Cyberattack on large Russian bread factory disrupts supply deliveries

A cyberattack on a major bread producer in Russia’s Vladimir region has disrupted food deliveries, local media reported.

The Vladimir Bread Factory — one of the largest bakery producers in the region — said in a statement that its internal digital systems were hit overnight on Sunday, knocking out office computers, servers, electronic document management tools and the widely used 1C enterprise accounting system.

While production itself was not affected and bakeries continued operating at full capacity, the outage complicated order processing and deliveries. Local residents, retail outlets and food suppliers for social institutions reported difficulties fulfilling existing contracts and temporary shortages of the company’s bakery products in stores.

Large retail chains acknowledged the delivery issues but said there was no widespread shortage of bread on store shelves.

To keep supplies moving, the company shifted all office staff to a round-the-clock schedule and temporarily reverted to manual processing of orders and shipments. The factory has not provided a timeline for fully restoring its digital systems and apologized to partners and consumers for the disruption.

The identity of the attackers and the nature of the incident remain unclear.

This is not the first cyberattack affecting Russia’s food sector. In June, local dairy producers reported supply problems after a cyberattack disabled the country’s digital certification system for animal-based products, forcing companies to revert to paper veterinary certificates and causing logistical delays.

In December, a major dairy processing plant in southern Siberia was hit by a ransomware attack that encrypted its systems. Local media speculated that the breach may have been linked to the plant’s reported support for Russian troops in Ukraine, though no official attribution was made.