The attack was carried out by hackers, and relevant authorities have been notified of the incident. The system was relaunched on Thursday, and no customer data has been lost, the company reports in a statement.
Aquabyte’s customers are mainly fish farmers in Norway.
“Cyber attacks have unfortunately become an increasing societal problem both in Norway and internationally. Our customers have been informed, and we apologize for the possible consequences the attack has had for them,” said CEO Hans Jørgen Runshaug.
“We are working intensely to discover how we were put out of action in this way. External technical expertise is engaged, which together with our own employees will find out how the attack was carried out, in order to prevent something similar from happening again. Aquabyte will also investigate whether data may have gone astray as a result of the incident,” said Runshaug.
Founder Bryton Shang started Aquabyte in 2017 with the idea of using the latest technology in machine learning to run fish farming in a more efficient way. Just over two years later, Aquabyte went from being a prototype in a bathtub in Silicon Valley to becoming a software company that facilitates the work for fish farmers in Norway, Great Britain, Chile and Russia.
In short, Aquabyte’s product package consists of a camera and equipment package, a cloud-based machine learning solution that performs image analysis, as well as analysis tools and decision bases through a web portal.
Aquabyte has approximately 50 employees in the USA, Chile and Norway.