Cyberattack makes Bridgestone disconnect factories and adopt manual production

Bridgestone, one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers, had to disconnect its factories from the internet on Sunday (27) after an “information security incident”.

The situation, which the company avoids calling a cyberattack, affects the manufacture of tires and industrial products in Latin America and North America. In Brazil, the pace of production is slower at the plants in Camaçari (BA). In Santo André (ABC São Paulo), the dispatch of ready-made tires is stopped, according to the workers’ union.

“As a precaution, the company has disconnected many of its manufacturing and retreading operations in Latin America and North America from our network to contain and prevent any impact.”

The company says that all internal systems have been restored within the last 24 hours. At the factories, Bridgestone says there will be a need for additional shifts to ensure the full production level. The manufacturer does not say how much of its production was affected by the situation.

In Bahia, the company produces around 11,000 tires a day and has around 1,000 employees. There, according to the president of the Rubber Workers Union of Salvador, Camaçari and the Metropolitan Region, Josué Pereira, production is not stopped, but is at a different pace.

“All the automated part is stopped and the factory has no internet. Only manual things work”, he says. On Monday, the factory in Bahia was in what the unionist called a state of maintenance.

“The teams kept trying to correct the faults and some activities were re-established, but everything was disconnected”, he says. “People are working, but they don’t run at the same speed. We just don’t know the loss yet.”

In Santo André, the president of Sintrabor (Union of Workers in Rubber Artifacts Industries), Márcio Ferreira, says that production is maintained. “The equipment is old, nothing depends on this level of automation.” There, what employees heard was that the company had suffered a hacker attack.

The problem, according to him, is that production cannot be dispatched to factories and distributors as there is no way to issue orders, calculate ICMS (Tax on Circulation of Goods and Services) and issue invoices. At ABC, Bridgestone employs around 3,000 people.

The manufacturer says the incident was identified in the early hours of Sunday morning and that the episode is under investigation.

Bridgestone says its information technology team is dedicated to re-establishing online systems like those used for ordering, shipping and invoicing. “Direct deliveries to customers from distribution and storage centers are also being resumed”, he says.

According to an internal communiqué to which the sheet had access, the manufacturer asked its employees to only use the remote system for business-critical needs.

On Monday (28), Toytota paralyzed its operations at the factory in Tokyo after what is suspected to have been a cyberattack on a supplier of plastic parts and electronic components, according to the Reuters news agency. The Japanese automaker lost about 13,000 vehicles with the stoppage.

For the AFP agency, Japanese government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno said that “the risk of cyberattacks grows due to the current situation, including Ukraine”, and urged companies to “strengthen cybersecurity measures”.