SABMiller, the company behind Foster’s, Peroni, and Coors Light, has revealed how a computer virus cost it over £7m after it was forced to halt production for fear of making contaminated beer.
Speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in London, SABMiller’s chief information security officer Mark Brown said the “conficker” virus – which is said to have affected 3 million PCs worldwide – had hit the business hard.
The conficker worm was one of the most severe computer security problems in recent years, which took advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft’s software, forming a massive botnet.
Brown said: “Last April, I had to close down the Romanian operation for four hours because of the virus. It cost us £7.2m [the revenue target lost, based on how much the breweries would have produced for sale during that time].”
Within minutes he said he had received a call from his board asking him what he was doing but they accepted his decision after he argued that the effect on the company’s market capitalisation would be far worse if SABMiller had manufactured and sold poisoned stock.
“We have to understand what the organisation is. Anything I do has to enable the production of beer – that’s what SABMiller does. The business exists to make profit, [so the security strategy] has to be business-aligned and business focused,” he said. “[I would ask myself] ‘how will it impact SABMiller, and when?’ The only way you can know this is by truly understanding the business.”
Brown’s decision certainly paid off in budget terms too. “You have to put together a three to five-year budget business plan. When I did this, I got a 1,200% increase in budget [at a time when people are having budgets cut] because I could be seen to be demonstrating value to the business and protecting the business, and not just worrying about IT,” said Brown.
