A ransomware attack shut down fairlife’s production without ever touching the product. For manufacturers, OT resiliency is no longer optional.
A ransomware attack just shut down a $4 billion brand’s production lines, and it should be a wake-up call for every manufacturer running automated operations.
This month, The Coca-Cola Company announced that in connection with a ransomware event, an unauthorized third party accessed its production-related systems. The company confirmed in a public statement that product quality and safety were not impacted, but that US operations remain suspended. The attackers didn’t need to touch the product. They only needed to reach the systems that make it, and that was enough to stop the line.
fairlife is not an isolated case. Similar ransomware incidents at Arizona Beverages and food distributor UNFI caused weeks-long disruptions, empty shelves, and lost revenue. The pattern across OT environments is consistent: attackers rarely need sophisticated exploits. Compromised credentials, exposed remote-access services, and other identity weaknesses are usually enough to get in and move laterally toward the plant floor.
Why recovery is the hard part
Here’s what makes these incidents so painful: recovery isn’t flipping a switch. Production depends on specialized hardware and software, including legacy PLCs, HMIs, and controllers, that was never designed for today’s threat landscape. Bringing a plant back safely means validating the integrity of those production systems, not just restoring IT servers. Too often, the code that runs a line lives on a single engineer’s laptop or on the controller itself, with no version history and no verified backup to restore from. When something goes down, “how fast can we recover?” has no good answer.
That gap is exactly what OT resiliency closes. In the IT world, version control, automated backups, audit trails, and tested recovery have been standard practice for years. On the plant floor, those same safeguards are still the exception, not the rule, and that is what leaves production so exposed when an attack lands.
Ransomware on the plant floor is now a question of when, not if, and the teams that recover in hours instead of weeks tend to be the ones who built resilience into their operations first. Copia’s OT resiliency and code management platform helps teams get there, automatically backing up and version-controlling PLC and automation code so there’s always a verified, last-known-good state to restore.
Learn how Copia can help strengthen your OT resiliency, request a demo.
