Coca-Cola Unit Becomes 17th US Cyber Incident This Year

Seventeen companies in the United States have reported or been affected by cyber incidents this year amid a worldwide surge in artificial intelligence-driven cyberattacks, Reuters reported Friday (July 17).

The latest company to report a cyberattack is Fairlife, a dairy company owned by The Coca-Cola Co. Coca-Cola said in a Thursday press release that Fairlife identified unauthorized access by a third party to its production-related systems and some other systems, in connection with a ransomware event, temporarily suspended its U.S. production operations, and is working to complete an investigation and restore the systems.

“After detecting the issue, the company promptly activated its incident response and business continuity protocols,” Coca-Cola said in the release. “The company’s investigation and assessment of the impact of the incident is ongoing, with the assistance of outside advisers and cybersecurity experts. The company has also notified law enforcement.”

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said in April that it received 22,364 internet crime complaints that contained references to AI in 2025. These AI-related complaints reported losses of $893 million.

“AI-enabled synthetic content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make, which allows criminal actors to potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against individuals, businesses and financial institutions,” the FBI said in its 2025 Internet Crime Report.

Overall, across all categories of internet crime, IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints that reported $20.9 billion in losses in 2025. Those figures were up from 859,532 and $16.6 billion, respectively, in 2024.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Is That Content Generated by AI or Humans? Hard to Tell” found that content produced by AI can deceive humans and AI systems alike and that this has led to businesses and regulators racing to implement strategies to address the growing threat.

The White House launched an AI security initiative called Gold Eagle on Tuesday (July 14), saying this federal AI cybersecurity clearinghouse is designed to consolidate vulnerability findings from government and critical infrastructure industries, prioritize the most consequential flaws and coordinate remediation before they are exploited.