Dive Brief:
- Ahold Delhaize said Monday that there is no evidence that any sensitive customer, associate or partner data was taken during the cybersecurity incident that the company disclosed last week. The investigation is still ongoing, the company said.
- Ahold Delhaize USA’s banner sites and apps came back online Tuesday morning after at least eight days of being inoperable.
- The update comes a week after Ahold Delhaize announced it was experiencing a cybersecurity incident and, as a precautionary measure, took several systems offline.
Dive Insight:
While Ahold Delhaize did not state exactly when it detected “suspicious activity in its IT infrastructure,” the company said it took immediate action and engaged cybersecurity experts to investigate.
The investigation confirmed that the suspicious activity resulted from the “malicious actions of others,” according to the Monday company announcement. The discovery led Ahold Delhaize to proactively take certain systems offline, including brand websites and apps.
“Taking systems offline to help protect them was a precautionary measure that affected most of our brands across Europe and the United States. The investigation to date confirms this was the right decision,” Ahold Delhaize President and CEO Frans Muller said in a statement.
In addition to the company’s U.S. banners, its three impacted European grocery chains — Albert Heijn, Etos and Gall & Gall — are back online, with Ahold Delhaize noting that home delivery via Albert Heijn is expected to resume Friday. In Belgium, the company’s e-commerce is now fully operational, while the majority of websites and apps for its brands in the Central and Southeastern Europe regions are available for shoppers, per the announcement.
Ahold Delhaize notified the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre within 24 hours of discovering the malicious activity and continues to provide updates to them, law enforcement and other relevant regulatory authorities, the press release said.
Ahold Delhaize said it filed a police report with the Dutch police on Monday.
Update: This story was updated to reflect that Ahold Delhaize's U.S. banners resumed online operations Tuesday morning.
