South Hill Fine Foods has announced that they have had to temporarily shut their doors after experiencing a system hack which has shut down all tills, computers, and systems in the store.

Signs on the front door warning customers of the closure

General Manager, Perry Chambers, told us what happened.

"Somebody ransomed our store. That means all of our computers, everything it takes to run a store – they have access to it and put us on ransom. All of our charge accounts, our whole price file system, they have all that. It is a nightmare."

Chambers says he has no idea what the exact cost of fixing it will be, but he's expecting it will be in the thousands. Not only do new computers and tills need to be purchased and programmed, but they also have to deal with lost revenue from having their doors shut, staff expenses while they work to get things up and running, as well as the cost of having someone help fix the issue.

"Its a lot of work to get the store up and running again. Everything in this store that scans, they have access to, so we can't use anything from our old system, nothing. Everything in our store that scans has to be put back into the new system, and that is a phenomenal amount of work. It's like opening up a brand new store from zero."

Chambers says the store had security measures in place, but that he believes the hackers got into the system through a phishing email.

We asked him how he thinks the store can recover from something like this.

"I don't think we ever can. It's our expense now to get a brand new till system, we need 3 new tills, computers, everything, and just the manpower alone to try and get this thing up and running again is phenomenal. I just hope they catch the people that are doing this because it can ruin someone."

While the work won't be over, Chambers is hoping South Hill Fine Foods will have their doors open again on Thursday.

READ MORE: Smaller Businesses Being Targeted by Cybercriminals