Last week, Coca-Cola disclosed that a ransomware attack forced it to suspend all U.S. production at Fairlife, its billion-dollar dairy subsidiary. The company filed an SEC report, called in cybersecurity experts, and notified law enforcement. Canadian operations stayed open. American ones went dark.

The attack didn’t poison any products. It didn’t compromise consumer data (as far as we know). What it did was something arguably worse for a company moving perishable goods through a time-sensitive supply chain: it stopped the machines. For a business built on ultra-filtered milk and protein shakes with short shelf lives, every hour of downtime translates directly into spoiled inventory, missed retail windows, and empty shelves.

And Fairlife isn’t an outlier. It’s a data point in a trend that supply chain leaders can’t afford to ignore.

The Numbers Are Getting Worse

The Food and Agriculture Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Food and Ag-ISAC) confirmed that the food and agriculture sector has been hit with roughly 205 ransomware attacks so far in 2026. That accounts for about 4.9% of all ransomware incidents tracked globally.

For context, the sector experienced 265 attacks across the entirety of 2025, up sharply from prior years. At the current pace, 2026 is on track to surpass that total before October.

The IT-ISAC’s annual report paints a broader picture. Across all industries, 6,351 ransomware attacks were observed in 2025. The IT sector itself saw nearly 750 incidents, more than double the 300 it experienced in 2024. Manufacturing led the list. Commercial facilities came second. IT was third.

What’s changed isn’t just the volume. It’s the speed. The IT-ISAC noted that attackers are now “weaponizing critical zero-day vulnerabilities in platforms within hours of disclosure.” Not days, not weeks. Hours. That’s a fundamentally different threat model than the one most supply chain security programs were built to handle.

Why Supply Chains Are Targets

Scott Algeier, executive director of the Food and Ag-ISAC, put it bluntly: attackers “scan for exposed, vulnerable systems at machine speed and determine the victim’s details after initial access.” They’re not necessarily picking the food industry on purpose. They’re finding unlocked doors, walking through them, and then figuring out who owns the building.

That matters because of how modern supply chains are wired. A warehouse management system (WMS) talks to an ERP, which talks to a transportation management system (TMS), which connects to carrier APIs, which feed data to customer portals. Each integration point is a potential entry. Each legacy system running unpatched software is a vulnerability.

And the attack surface has grown. Think about what’s connected in a modern distribution center: RF scanners on the warehouse floor, IoT sensors tracking temperature in cold chain operations, automated sortation systems, robotic pick modules, yard management terminals. Ten years ago, most of this equipment ran on isolated networks. Today, it’s increasingly connected to cloud platforms for real-time visibility, predictive maintenance, and AI-driven optimization.

That connectivity drives efficiency. It also creates pathways for attackers.

The Cl0p ransomware gang, one of the most active groups tracked by the IT-ISAC, has shown a disproportionate interest in food and agriculture targets. More than 9% of Cl0p’s attacks in 2025 targeted the sector, well above the 4% average across all threat actors. Meanwhile, Qilin, a ransomware-as-a-service operation, has deployed a Rust-based encryption tool that can efficiently target multiple operating systems, making it adaptable across the mix of Windows, Linux, and proprietary platforms common in warehouse and logistics environments.

The Operational Reality of an Attack

When ransomware hits a supply chain operation, the damage extends far beyond encrypted files. Consider what happens when a WMS goes offline at a distribution center:

Inbound receiving stops because the system can’t process ASNs or generate putaway instructions. Outbound shipping halts because pick lists can’t be generated and orders can’t be allocated. Inventory accuracy goes to zero because every movement since the last clean backup is uncertain. Carrier appointments get missed. Retail compliance penalties start accumulating.

For Coca-Cola, Fairlife’s perishable product line amplifies every one of these problems. Ultra-filtered milk doesn’t wait for your IT team to finish incident response. The company invested $650 million to expand its Coopersville, Michigan facility and planned to open a 745,000-square-foot plant in Webster, New York this year. Those investments assume continuous production throughput. Ransomware breaks that assumption.

The company said the attack “has had no effect on the quality and safety” of its products, which suggests production was halted as a precaution rather than because products were contaminated. That’s actually the right call. But it also shows how a cybersecurity incident becomes a supply chain disruption, which becomes a financial event, which becomes an SEC filing. The cascade is fast and the blast radius is wide.

What Supply Chain Leaders Should Be Doing

If you’re running warehouse or logistics operations, the Fairlife incident should trigger a conversation that goes beyond your IT security team. Here’s where to focus:

Segment your OT networks. The single most impactful step is separating operational technology (warehouse automation, conveyor controls, RF systems) from your corporate IT network. If ransomware gets into email servers, it shouldn’t be able to reach your sortation system. Network segmentation isn’t glamorous, but it’s the difference between a contained incident and a full operational shutdown.

Audit your WMS and TMS backup and recovery plans. Most companies test disaster recovery for their ERP. Far fewer have tested what happens when their WMS goes down for 72 hours. Can you run your warehouse on paper? Do your operators even know how? Running tabletop exercises specifically for supply chain system outages will expose gaps you didn’t know existed.

Patch aggressively, especially edge devices. Those RF scanners, IoT sensors, and edge computing devices in your DC are running software too. They need updates. The IT-ISAC report highlighted that living-off-the-land techniques, where attackers use legitimate system tools to move laterally, are increasingly common. An unpatched device on the warehouse floor can be the pivot point.

Vet your integration partners. Your WMS vendor, your 3PL’s TMS, your EDI provider, your cloud analytics platform. Every API connection is a trust relationship. Ask them about their security posture. If they can’t answer clearly, that’s information you need.

Build manual fallback procedures. The companies that recover fastest from cyber incidents are the ones that have practiced operating without their systems. Print your pick process documentation. Train supervisors on paper-based receiving. It feels old-fashioned until the morning your systems are encrypted and your customers are calling.

The Bigger Picture

The Coca-Cola attack will get attention because of the brand name. But the 204 other attacks on food and agriculture operations this year happened at companies most people have never heard of. Regional distributors. Cold storage operators. Ingredient suppliers. The smaller the company, the less likely it is to have dedicated security staff, segmented networks, or tested recovery procedures.

That creates risk not just for those individual companies but for the supply chains they participate in. When your tier-two supplier’s warehouse goes offline because of ransomware, their problem becomes your problem. The interconnected nature of modern supply chains means cybersecurity is no longer just an IT concern. It’s an operational resilience concern, right alongside weather events, labor disruptions, and tariff volatility.

Supply chain leaders spend significant resources on visibility platforms, demand sensing, and network optimization. Those investments assume the systems themselves will keep running. Ransomware challenges that assumption, and the attackers are getting faster. The question isn’t whether your supply chain will face a cyber incident. It’s whether you’ve prepared well enough that it remains an incident, not a catastrophe.