Cyberattack on French grocery freezers causes spoilage, fires
A major hacking incident in France has left hundreds of supermarkets with spoiled food products and damaged equipment.
NBC News reports that an Oct. 12 cyberattack on roughly 350 supermarkets in France caused their freezers and refrigerators to heat up, and in some cases, catch fire, leading to millions of dollars in losses due to defrosted and perished food. Retailers including Carrefour, Monoprix, Intermarche and Cooperative U were reportedly affected by the attack.
French and European law enforcement are currently investigating the incident. So far, no group has publicly taken responsibility or asked for any type of ransom in connection to the attack, which reportedly targeted Internet-connected cooling systems provided by Danish software firm Danfoss.
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In a statement quoted by NBC News, Danfoss said many of the affected units were at the end of their life and/or running outdated firmware, and that affected grocers had been warned to migrate and update outdated systems. In addition, in August a security weakness in a Danfoss software platform was identified and patched.
Estimates of potential financial damages from the attack range up to almost $225,000 for a large hypermarket and tens of millions of dollars in total. Cooperative U CEO Dominique Schelcher told NBC News that 80 out of the grocer’s roughly 2,000 stores in France were affected by the attack.
“This is about basic cyber hygiene,” Ken Munro, partner at U.K. cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, told NBC News. “Get it wrong and you get a smelly mess of defrosted food.”
Munro also said the ease of which the cooling system software could be hacked and the lack of monetary demands suggests this may have been more of a prank than a coordinated criminal effort. According to Reuters, at least 4,500 Danfoss cooling system software interfaces were visible on the Internet as of Tuesday, Oct. 13.
This is a developing story and Chain Store Age will provide updates as they occur.
