Schmear Apocalypse
"When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine."
— Revelation 6:5-6
Famine is considered the third horse of the apocalypse. The rider holds scales to demonstrate how the bread would have to be weighed if there had been a famine. A denarius was a single silver coin in ancient Rome. In biblical terms, it was a day's wage for a laborer. The price of a quart of wheat for a denarius would be beyond the reach of the average worker.
It was impossible to find cream cheese at the grocery store near the end of 2021. What appeared to be a mild inconvenience could be a symptom of a much larger problem. Not having cream cheese schmear on your bagel is one of the thousands of unseen combinatorial secondary effects of the pandemic. Abraham Maslow published a paper titled "A Theory of Human Motivation" in 1943. Maslow expanded the concept to include observations on human needs, referred to as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Physiological needs such as water, warmth, and food are at the bottom of the pyramid. There have been recent cyberattacks on water treatment facilities, US power grids, and the food supply. In May 2021, the world's largest meat processing company, JBS, paid the equivalent of $11m for a ransomware attack.
So in October 2021, when Schreiber Foods was hit with $2.5 million ransomware, the only newspaper mention of the attack was in the "Wisconsin State Farmer." Bloomberg and CNN didn't catch on until December, when the grocery store shelves started clearing up. It looks like the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal still haven't figured out the event's significance. The incident couldn't have come at a worse time as they started their busy holiday season before Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas.
The cream cheese industry had already been stressed due to the pandemic. The demand for cream cheese increased by 18% during the pandemic shutdowns as people baked more at home. Labor shortages and supply chain disruptions for raw materials, packaging, and trucking hampered manufacturers before the cyberattack and holiday demand spike. Covid related deaths, burnout, and early retirements also played an essential role in the net effect of the Schmear Apocalypse.
Schreiber Foods is one of Wisconsin's largest milk providers and second behind Kraft as the largest producer of cream cheese. In Mark Swartz's "Seat at the Table," he asks the question of whether a company is serious about information technology if the CIO doesn't have a direct seat at the executive, board-level table. In the case of Schreiber Foods, they don't even have a seat at the C-Level table for security. Their top security professional, even today, is at a director level. They still don't have a Chief Security Officer. A recent study revealed that 85% of hospitals lack even a single qualified cybersecurity professional on staff. Food and agriculture are even worse. Most of the devices and software used in computerized food processing are overlooked, old, and unpatched. You could say they don't know what they don't know, or they probably would say, who attacks a cream cheese factory anyway?
Because most of Schreiber Foods' manufacturing processes are automated, the ransomware attack crippled their complete operation for five days. In turn, this created a ripple effect of a market unable to meet the unprecedented demand. The loss of production shook the entire market. This time, it was just cream cheese, but this is an example of a combinatorial effect that should be viewed with a cautionary lens for possible worse things to come.
