Supplier for supermarkets including Lidl, Aldi, Tesco, and Sainsbury's hit by cyber attack

A major food distributor for some of the UK's biggestchains has been hit with a cyber attack. The logistics firm Peter Green Chilled said it was being "held to ransom" by cyber hackers who broke into their systems on Wednesday last week.

The firm supplies major UK chains, including , , and , but it is not among the top 30 UK food distributors. According to , the firm is regularly updating its clients and is sorting out "workarounds" on how it can continue deliveries.

In an email sent on Thursday last week - and seen by the - the firm said it was unable to process orders from Thursday, although orders put through beforehand would be sent.

The company's managing director, Tom Binks, confirmed that a cyber attack had occurred but could not comment further. He said, "The transport activities of the business have continued unaffected throughout this incident."

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One of those affected by this cyber incident is Black Farmer founder Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, who has "10 pallets worth of meat products" distributed to by Pater Green Chilled. He warned that if the products did not make it to supermarkets in time, they would be "thrown in the bin. "

He told the BBC: "There's no information. Everything along the chain has to be stopped, and then there are thousands of pounds worth of product that are just wasting away."

The news comes after major supermarket chains and the have made headlines over the last few weeks after being hit by cyber attacks. M&S was hit by the attack over the Easter bank holiday weekend, and a few days later, it stopped taking clothing and home orders through its website and app.

Certain clothing, home, and food products then became unavailable, with customers seeing empty shelves across some M&S stores. Last week, it confirmed that some personal customer information was stolen in the hack.

The retailer has yet to restore its online shopping. Reuters reports that the retail market is aiming to prioritise "safety over speed".

Following this, the Co-op narrowly avoided being locked out of its systems during an attack that exposed customer data and caused stock shortages.

Phil Pluck, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, said the warehousing, food storage and distribution sectors were "constantly under attack".

He told the BBC that there had been a few cyber attacks a few years ago. However, there had been a "huge increase" in the last year. He explained that hackers were aware of how "critical" distribution was as half of food consumed in the UK was through the "cold chain sector", adding that this was a "really good lever to put the pressure on our companies to actually pay that ransomware".

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