Every year since we got married, my husband and I have celebrated our anniversary with a carrot cake. Some years it was from the amazing bakery in our old neighborhood, while others it was a questionably fresh effort picked up at a train station shop on the way home from the office, but often I would bake my own.
The funny thing is, neither of us really likes carrot cake. It just somehow ended up being the top layer of our wedding cake, so we have one every year. That's tradition for you.
This year, for our 20th anniversary, I had my mind set on baking. Throwing together a three-layer cake in the middle of a busy work day may sound daunting, but it's well within my skill set. And I was armed with a new recipe and a giant bag of carrots. I just needed a few key ingredients.
Always the procrastinator, I started filling my online shopping cart the night before. I also needed the makings for a fairly fancy dinner, as well as my regular groceries for the week. But to my surprise, the virtual shelves of my NYC-area Whole Foods were uncharacteristically bare. It brought back memories of the pandemic. Basic store-brand items that I buy every week like tortillas, pizza sauce and cheese were out of stock. And so were the raisins and cream cheese I needed for my cake.
Slightly panicked at that point, I remembered the news of a cyberattack at one of Whole Foods' major suppliers a few days before that forced it to take its systems offline. Some experts had speculated that it could affect store supplies, but I hadn't expected the impact to be so quick and so significant.
Cybercriminals have long-targeted retail companies, along with those that supply them, for both their money and data. They know that if they're successful in breaching those systems, retailers will likely pay to make the problem go away.
That said, this year has been particularly bad for cyberattacks on retailers, says Max Vetter, vice president of cyber at Immersive, which specializes in training companies for how to deal with online threats.
So far this year, retailers including Adidas, Marks & Spencer, Harrods, Cartier, Victoria's Secret and North Face have all sustained cyberattacks that affected their operations. And while Whole Foods' supplier, United Natural Foods, isn't technically a retailer, the impact of the attack on it continues to be felt by consumers.
"This is not normal," says Vetter, who worked in British law enforcement and as an intelligence analyst before joining Immersive. "We haven't seen this in retail and food any other year that I can remember."
For companies, that can mean millions in lost sales and unexpected costs related to dealing with attacks. In the case of United Natural Foods, its stock price tumbled on the news, dropping about 20% over the past week.
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