anotherjesse

Hackers just turned the freezers in roughly 150 French supermarkets into ovens. They flipped the refrigeration systems' defrost function and set temperatures as high as 50°C overnight. Entire stocks of fresh and frozen food cooked inside the cases while the stores were closed. And this exact attack was described in public two months ago. Back in August, security researchers at Claroty and Armis published vulnerabilities in the controllers that run supermarket cold chains, including Danfoss's AK-SM 800A. One demo showed a fridge being warmed while the dashboard kept displaying a normal temperature. Danfoss shipped a patch the same month. Two and a half weeks after that disclosure, freezers at grocery stores on 14 US military bases across 11 states flipped into defrost mode on the same night. The Pentagon investigated. No hack was ever confirmed. Now France. BFMTV reports the attack targeted older versions of Danfoss refrigeration software, meaning the fix had been sitting there for two months. One Super U in Alsace threw out €220,000 of food. An Intermarché in the same town lost €50,000. Nationwide damage could run into the millions. Nobody patches a fridge. A supermarket updates its registers and its website because that's where the money moves. The controller in the back room keeping the yogurt at 4°C gets installed once and touched never. CISA says controllers from these vendor families sit in two thirds of American supermarkets. No locks were broken and no register was touched. The whole attack was pressing the defrost button from the internet, on every store that skipped a firmware update.