Australian Sugar Producer Mackay Sugar Reports Cyber Incident
Australian Sugar Producer Mackay Sugar Reports Cyber Incident
Publish Date: 2026-06-15 15:16:00
Source Domain: securityaffairs.com
Australian Sugar Producer Mackay Sugar Reports Cyber Incident
Pierluigi Paganini
June 15, 2026
Mackay Sugar, Australia’s second-largest sugar producer, disclosed a cyberattack on June 10, potentially affecting key processing operations.
Mackay Sugar is one of Australia’s largest sugar producers and the country’s second-largest sugar manufacturer. The company is based in the Mackay region of tropical North Queensland and has more than 140 years of history in sugar cane processing. It operates three major sugar mills, Farleigh, Marian, and Racecourse, and produces around 700,000 tonnes of raw sugar annually for domestic and export markets. The company disclosed a cyberattack on June 10.
The timing is brutal: the attack hit during the crushing season, when mills run continuously and any interruption means cane sitting in fields or trucks with nowhere to go. Two of the three mills appear to have been forced offline.
“Mackay Sugar is responding to a cyber security incident affecting some of our operations.” reads the report published by the company. “Our immediate focus is the safety of our people, protecting operational systems, and maintaining business continuity.”
The company engaged cybersecurity experts to investigate the security breach, contacted relevant authorities, and stood up manual workarounds to keep critical functions running. It didn’t say which systems were hit, whether operational technology was involved, or whether any data was taken.
By June 12, Mackay Sugar had managed to restart a limited manual crushing operation at Farleigh Mill, processing cane that had been harvested before the attack. That’s a meaningful distinction: the mill ran on cane already cut, not on fresh supply coming in from the field. The rest of the supply chain, the systems that coordinate cane delivery, harvesting logistics, and mill intake, was still down. No new cane was…
