Australian sugar producer Mackay Sugar suffered a cyberattack during its peak cane crushing season, disrupting operations at a particularly damaging time for the business. The attack prevented crops from being processed, causing direct economic harm tied to the seasonal and time-critical nature of sugar production. This is a clear example of threat actors targeting operational technology (OT) environments in critical agricultural infrastructure where downtime has immediate, real-world consequences.

Security Architect’s Take: Review your OT/IT network segmentation and ensure operational systems cannot be reached laterally from corporate IT environments; organisations running time-sensitive industrial processes should have tested, offline incident response playbooks and pre-negotiated recovery SLAs with OT vendors before an attack occurs — not after.

Original advisory: Cyberattack sees crops kept in the ground