Hackers drove the temperature of connected fridges at several hundred French supermarkets up to 50-degrees celsius overnight on Sunday, spoiling food worth millions and even causing fires.
What happened?
The Paris prosecutor's office said a 'large-scale' attack was 'affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France,' with damage including 'food losses and fires'. It has opened an investigation to identify the victims and establish the link between the attack and the fires. BFM TV said the hackers remotely triggered forced defrosting. Les Mousquetaires, which owns IntermarchE, said about 150 of its stores had fridges heated to 50-degree celsius for six hours, and that it threw away all the affected food to avoid health risks.
Who was behind the cyberattack?
Cooperative U chief executive Dominique Schelcher called the attack 'of extreme gravity' and 'unprecedented'. Carrefour said 80 supermarkets were affected, though most of its 6,000 stores were not. Monoprix said about 5 percent of its stores were hit. Sekoia analyst Felix Aime said Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium were also affected. A Paris resident told Reuters he watched Intermarche staff tip carts of defrosted food into a skip as melted ice cream ran into the street.
Intermarché CEO Thierry Cotillard told BFM TV the attack would cost 'tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day'. No industry-wide estimate exists yet. French retail association FCD said some stores were already back up and running.
How the attack worked
Reuters noted that supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage a store's fridges and freezers and can be reached over the internet, so maintenance firms can adjust them from anywhere. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu instructed France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI to investigate. A spokesperson said ANSSI had identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.
Danfoss said it was aware of incidents affecting "a limited number of refrigeration management systems." It said the affected units 'were running outdated firmware' and that it had long advised customers to update and to move legacy systems to current-generation solutions.
