Food suppliers and retailers have been warned to urgently update the software on their fridges as European supermarkets have been hit by another wave of hacks, destroying millions of Euros of food.
Over 100 supermarkets and food suppliers in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, and Estonia were the target of a hacking attack late on Sunday night. The attackers remotely instructed internet-connect smart refrigerators in stores and warehouses to engage their defrost mode, boosting temperatures from the normal working sub-freezing to as high as 50 degrees centigrade (122 F).
While a handful of these attacks were detected quickly, most were not and huge quantities of food were defrosted, rendering them unfit for human consumption. The affected supermarkets and chains include French and German retail giants Carrefour and EDEKA, as well as Spar, Intermarché, ICA Group, Colruyt, Axfood, Delhaize, the Belgian Cooperative, and IKEA.
Some stores quickly deployed refrigerated trucks, allowing staff to transfer frozen goods before they were destroyed. Elsewhere, supermarkets hired dumpsters and brought staff in overnight to clear the shelves of spoiled food. Millions of Euros of food has been destroyed.
The European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Christophe Hansen said the hacks were a deliberate bid to sabotage food supply in Europe and undermine public confidence. Who is behind the attacks is not yet known, but the European Union has said it will investigate.
This latest attack on the food industry follows by weeks another, larger attack where hackers did the same, taking advantage of vulnerabilities in outdated software loaded onto smart fridges intended to allow large grocery businesses to remotely monitor and troubleshoot their equipment across the whole business. In that case, over 700 supermarkets were hit.
The realisation that the digital systems that help keep Western civilisation fed and alive is actually mostly unprotected and connected to the open internet, and consequently massively vulnerable to attack by even technically unsophisticated malign actors has triggered a wave of investigations. As reported by Breitbart News, the Pentagon is now considering whether a series of refrigeration failures impacting the daily chow for troops may have not been simple malfunctions but deliberate sabotage.
