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Employees exit from the JBS Beef Production Facility in Greeley,Colorado.Credit:Bloomberg

JBS said the vast majority of its facilities were operational at the time it made the payment,but it decided to pay in order to avoid any unforeseen issues and ensure no data was exfiltrated.

The FBI has attributed the attack to REvil (short for ransomware evil),a Russian-speaking gang that has made some of the largest ransomware demands on record in recent months.

The FBI said it would work to bring the group to justice and it urged anyone who was the victim of a cyber attack to contact the bureau immediately.

The attack targeted servers supporting JBS’s operations in North America and Australia. Production was disrupted for several days.

Earlier this week,the US Justice Department announced it had recovered most of a multimillion-dollar ransom payment made by Colonial Pipeline,the operator of America’s largest fuel pipeline.

Colonial paid a ransom of 75 bitcoin - then valued at $US4.4 million - in early May to a Russia-based hacker group. The operation to seize cryptocurrency reflected a rare victory in the fight against ransomware as US officials scramble to confront a rapidly accelerating threat targeting critical industries around the world.

It wasn’t immediately clear if JBS also paid its ransom in bitcoin.

JBS said it spent more than $US200 million annually on IT and employs more than 850 IT professionals globally.

The company said forensic investigations were still ongoing,but it didn’t believe any company,customer or employee data was compromised.