Hundreds of French supermarkets saw their refrigeration systems defrosted, spoiling tons of frozen food. The unprecedented attack has raised serious questions about food security across Europe.
Hundreds of French supermarkets were forced to throw away perishable goods on Monday after hackers commandeered refrigeration systems across the country, spoiling stock at major chains in a sophisticated overnight cyberattack.
Hackers destroyed the food by taking control of refrigeration systems at Cooperative U, Leclerc, Les Mousquetaires, and Intermarche stores across the country and then defrosting thousands of freezer and refrigeration units.
During the overnight attack, in some cases, fully-stocked fridges were heated up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) for more than six hours. Over 400 stores were hit according to retailers.
They could still broadcast their temperature (securely, hopefully), without allowing any incomming commands.
Capitalism fucks up human brains or something because you’re 100% correct and every normal engineer would agree with you. 🤷♂️
Honestly, as someone who works in an adjacent industry, anything with a thermostat inevitably gets set to a crazy value. You need something smart enough you can program it to return to normal operation after a certain amount of time.
In theory, you can get that level of control locally with a fully isolated monitoring system, but it seems silly and an unnecessary cost to have two separate systems… Until you lose your entire fridge stock to a dweeb armed with ChatGPT.
What do you mean by “crazy values”? Like measurement drift? Couldn’t that not also be reset periodically locally? Like, without a fixed isolated monitoring system but someone with a calibrated thermometer who checks the units and recalibrates them.
… Now that I’m thinking about it, don’t you need that anyway? If I’m “Mr. Fridge” sitting remote at Fridge-HQ I need an independent reading anyway so I can know whether that sensor just drifted or whether something is truely off.
Also, I fully agree with your last sentence. It’s always security vs. convenience. Looks like they chose poorly.
No, like one random dude overrides the fridge setting it to 20F because he’s gonna be going in and out a lot today and he doesnt want the “fridge too warm alert” to go off. Yes, you can put a hard limit on temp ranges, but then you can’t sell it as a “fridge or freezer”, and whatever the range, at some point, someone will set it to the highest or lowest value possible for no good reason.
For HVAC it’s usually someone complains about being too warm so they set the thermostat as low as it’ll go, then forget.