BY JENNIFER LAVIOLETTE

Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL) has been the target of a cybersecurity incident that at first masked itself as a system outage and has carried on to impact operations for the past couple of weeks. The Roblin Review reached out to FCL for comments, but were provided with only the statements issued through social media.
On June 27, FCL issued the following, “Federated Co-operatives Limited, which supplies your local Coop, is experiencing a cybersecurity incident that is impacting some customer-facing systems at local retail Co-op and cardlock fuel locations. As a precaution, we have shut down some of our systems and brought in third-party experts. An investigation is underway.”
Once it became clear that this was not a simple fix, some sites were able to resume through a different payment method.
On June 28, FCL released this statement, “A number of Co-op cardlocks are open for the purchase of clear fuel products. Purchases may be made by Visa, Mastercard or cardlock card. The cardlock sites in Manitoba that were open to this option were in Whitemouth, Ste. Rose du Lac, Gillam, Neepawa, Starbuck, Dominion Side and Winkler Southside.”
Shortly after addressing and working on the cardlock issue, FCL realized the threat had also impacted their operating systems within the grocery channel.
On June 29, FCL issued the following, “Federated Co-operatives Limited is experiencing a cyber security incident. This is impacting some internal and customer-facing systems and could impact our current inventory of certain grocery items. We appreciate your patience and support as we work through this incident.
“To our valued Co-op members, in response to questions regarding your data, Federated Co-operatives Limited has issued the following. We have no evidence at this time that consumer data was compromised. If the investigation determines that consumer data was compromised, we will take appropriate action.
“We regret this outage has occurred and thank Coop members and customers for their patience as our teams work to resolve the issue.”
After the long weekend, FCL released this statement on July 3, “As we continue to deal with a cybersecurity incident, we want to provide Co-op members and customers with an update. We are making significant process in restoring some operations. The cybersecurity incident has slowed down certain aspects of our business, but we are prioritizing key grocery items and consumer goods for delivery to local Co-ops. We are working to recover from the incident but ask for your patience as we continue to build our way to regular operations.
“Co-op cardlock fuel locations were widely impacted by the cybersecurity incident, but our teams continue to get more cardlocks pumping fuel every day. A main priority is to get all cardlock locations back online as soon as possible. We want to reinforce that fuel supply to Co-op retail gas bars has been relatively unaffected and customers can fill up at Co-op retail locations.
“We again want to thank our Co-op members, customers and the public for your patience and understanding. As a member-owned and community-facing co-operative retailing system, we all appreciate your support now more than ever. We will continue to keep you updated.”
Progress was made just before the weekend as FCL was able to restore all cardlocks back to full operations.
They issued this statement on July 4, “As we continue to deal with a cybersecurity incident, we want to provide Co-op members and customers with an update and some positive news. All 398 Co-op cardlock locations across Western Canada are back online. Our team has been working around the clock to recover our cardlock network and we want to thank Co-op cardlock customers for their patience and understanding throughout this process.”