Hundreds of French grocers likely lost many millions of dollars this week from cyberattacks that manipulated their refrigeration systems.
Overnight on Monday, hackers broke into commercial refrigeration system controllers at major French grocery chains. They converted refrigerators, freezers, and cold storage rooms into heating units, raising their temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius (over 120 degrees Fahrenheit), completely spoiling all of the food they contained, and reportedly even causing some small fires. The threat actor's identity and motives are unclear.
Refrigeration controllers allow grocers to set and monitor their fridge temperatures remotely, 24/7. It follows, then, that store owners could've been alerted to, or manually discovered, the fact that something was amiss. To prevent that from happening, French sources report that the attackers extended their targeted systems' defrost cycles — where freezers intentionally melt accumulated frost and ice — so that the heating looked like routine maintenance.
According to the companies' own reports, the attacks impacted somewhere north of 400 grocery and retail stores, all on the same night. An analyst for French cybersecurity company Sekoia told Reuters that Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and Belgium had also been affected.
Just two supermarkets in the Alsace region reported combined losses of 270,000 euros (about $300,000 USD), according to the BBC. If those two cases are anything to go by, losses for all 400 stores could total many, many millions of euros.
Worst of all, experts point out that the attacks were almost certainly avoidable with standard cyber hygiene.
What Caused Freezers to Burn?
Initial reports suggested that Monday's attacks traced back to refrigeration controllers from Danish manufacturer Danfoss. Danfoss has a large footprint in supermarket and food retail control solutions, with more than 50,000 installations of its technology worldwide, according to its website.