Hackers have forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50C overnight, in an “unprecedented” cyber-attack affecting several hundred stores across the country, with fires and food losses reported.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday the large-scale attack was “affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France”. Reported damage included “food losses and fires”, it added.
The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, instructed France’s national cybersecurity agency ANSSI to investigate, a person in his office said.
France “was coordinating with its European counterparts, as other countries may also be affected”, while also investigating whether any other French firms were at risk, they said.
Ok, so the fancy new systems are even worse than I expected. I have some experience with the older ones though.
Either those systems were never designed with the Internet in mind, or the people who installed them knew what they were doing and disabled all the unnecessary connections and features. Either way, the systems I’ve seen are probably pretty tricky to hack. I you want to change anything, you would need to be physically in the same network as the automation system itself.
That’s pretty much my experience too. I also just read that the Danfoss hack involved the username admin and for the password the date of today. A company like Danfoss should really know better, even if it was never meant to be connected to the internet.
Danfoss is definitely big enough to hire proper IT professionals and pay for regular audits. Makes me wonder how this mess was even possible.