This is a question posed by many wineries that think they couldn’t possibly be a target of a cyberattack. However, in early 2021, a large, privately owned Australian winery was a victim of a cyberattack that resulted in a temporary outage of its ordering system and email services.
The winery’s business operations were down for a day. It was suspected that outside hackers were retaliating against the winery’s criticisms of hefty wine tariffs on Australian wine exports, according to a Financial Review article published in March 2021.
Even with this example, the media’s focus on reporting an increasing number of high-profile attacks against large companies that operate in critical infrastructure sectors—such as Colonial Pipeline and JBS—can make it difficult to fathom that a small winery may be a viable target for a cyberattack.