A cyberattack, affecting at least 400 French supermarkets overnight, raised refrigerator temperatures to more than 122°F (50°C) in some cases, forcing millions of dollars’ worth of food to be discarded Monday.
“The weaponization of food has become a reality,” the EU commissioner for agriculture said. The scale of the hack demonstrated “a certain level of sophistication,” a cybersecurity consultant told AFP.
The Élysée has recently called to harden France’s digital infrastructure amid rising security breaches. Monday’s attack may have been continental — a Dutch supermarket chain operating in several countries reported network outages at distribution centers Monday, with one source telling Dutch broadcaster RTL, “You’re going to see huge gaps on the shelves in the coming days.”
Well, here we go! Maybe being able to monitor and control temps offsite wasn’t the best of ideas.
UPI has a fuller story here.
Agreed this seems to be less about the ‘weaponisation of food’ than the stupidity of fridges/fridge operators.
Whoever let a modem become “essential to the preservation of fresh products”, they need to be sacked.
If anything, this should’ve been a read-only, monitoring/alerting system.
I have something similar for my freezer because sometimes the door doesn’t close properly and, well… I too dislike tossing out a lot of food because it spoiled. A simple £10 sensor and a crafty little rule in my home automation system (sliding window averages, stored as historical data points, live comparison + alert if value is higher than usual for longer than 5 minutes), and I know if shit is going wrong.
No supermarket needs remote controllable systems for a fucking fridge. Period. Set up monitoring, alerting, and some minimal local presence. Bam, you’re done, if shit goes south, you can have a person there to fix it manually within 30-45 minutes. And hackers can’t fuck up your food.
I disagree. For any given attack, the attacker has most responsibilty. Destroying food is particularily vicious. If someone breaks into a house, taking davantage of an old rusted lock, and trashes the inside, the owner shouldn’t be called stupid.
It’s certainly a good idea a harden security and replace weak locks when the number of attacks increase.
Some things should not be “smart” technology.
I think it’s a funny warning by a good guy. The message is “get your shit together now before an all-out war”.
Broken link. Looks like you pasted the URL twice?
Fixed. The UPI story is better anyway.
