Japanese brewing giant Asahi Group Holdings has confirmed that a ransomware attack has caused the week-long outage at its domestic subsidiaries.
The company disclosed the incident last week, blaming order and shipment operational disruptions, and call center downtime on a cyberattack that resulted in system failures.
The company, which suspended production at some of its factories in Japan, underlined that the incident was limited to domestic subsidiaries and that its international operations were not impacted.
The Japanese beer giant owns known international brands, such as Grolsch, Peroni, and Pilsner Urquell. It also owns Fullers, the UK producer of London Pride.
On October 3, Asahi confirmed that the disruptions were the result of ransomware being deployed on its servers, but refrained from sharing specific information on the group responsible for the attack.
“We took immediate action to contain and respond to the incident. We placed the highest priority on safeguarding critical data, including the personal information of our customers and business partners, and promptly isolated the affected systems to minimize the impact,” the company said.
Asahi also confirmed that the hackers exfiltrated data from its servers, saying it is investigating the nature and scope of the information that was stolen.
“As a result of the containment measures, operations across our domestic group companies—including order placement and product shipment—have been affected. Additionally, we are currently unable to receive email communications from external sources,” the company said.
The beer giant implemented partial manual order processing and shipment to ensure product supply, and is working on resuming call center operations.
Asahi is scrambling to restore all impacted systems as soon as possible, but could not provide a specific timeline for recovery. It is also reviewing the potential impact on its financial results.
It is unclear if Asahi received any extortion demands or if it engaged in negotiations with the attackers. SecurityWeek has not seen any known ransomware groups claiming responsibility for the incident.
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