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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   2949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-cyberattack-forced-115141288.html

Major French supermarket chains on Monday said they were hit by a cyberattack that caused their refrigerators to shoot up in temperature in hundreds of stores, forcing spoiled food to be thrown away and raising concerns about food security.

"Food security requires more attention at all levels," said the EU's food and agriculture commissioner Christophe Hansen on X, condemning the attack and saying such "exploitation of food" was now a "reality".

At least 300 shops of Intermarche or its Netto brand were targeted, along with over 100 Cooperative U outlets, and several E. Leclerc stores, the retailers told AFP in separate statements.

BFM TV said hackers "managed to remotely trigger the forced defrosting of the refrigeration systems in numerous stores".

Those branches that were affected will have to "throw away all of the products" that are fresh and frozen, Intermarche told AFP.

Specialist French retail sector news website jebosseengrandedistribution.fr said other retail giants Carrefour Market and Monoprix were affected but the companies have yet to confirm this.

E. Leclerc confirmed to AFP "that a cyberattack affected one of its refrigeration equipment suppliers," resulting in "repercussions on the operation of refrigeration systems in several stores".

A source close to the issue said refrigeration control systems from Danish manufacturer Danfoss were targeted.

Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".

It said its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 fridge regulator systems were notably affected, with a version of the former using "outdated firmware". It added that it had long advised supermarkets to update from those models. Danfoss gave no figures of how many systems were affected.

A person close to French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said France's cyber security agency had already identified "a vulnerability in software supplied by a Danish company and has contacted the vendor".

"Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is extremely serious and is unprecedented. It is unacceptable," he wrote on X.

He added that the company's teams were "fully mobilised" to restore the situation as quickly as possible.

"An investigation will be necessary to shed full light on this attack," he added.

Intermarche condemned the food waste and financial losses resulting from the attack, without providing figures.

BFM TV said temperatures were "altered remotely, resulting in the destruction of stocks of fresh and frozen products".

The incident comes against the background of growing concern over the potential havoc that can be caused in Europe in all sectors by malicious actors carrying out cyberattacks.

By likely affecting hundreds of units simultaneously, the attack demonstrated "a certain level of sophistication," he added.

This is a poetry of stupid and the hackers are the least guilty party here. Lets start with the obvious. Why freezers needs to be visible, why do they need to be remotely managed, why is not this done on dedicated internal network, why do they need firmware updates. How did we get to the point where a device that should be pid controller, compressor and alarm can be hacked.

To make you feel better - all of your nice EVs are also permanently connected and I doubt that there is air gap between the infotainment and the firmware of the battery pack. Someday someone will be able to accelerate or set on fire EV remotely. And probably soon.

Why freezers needs to be visible, why do they need to be remotely managed, why is not this done on dedicated internal network, why do they need firmware updates

Having worked as a refrigeration tech before, I may have some insight- this was almost certainly done for management and monitoring. Defrost cycles are very important to keep freezers from bricking themselves, and danfoss controllers are very common as an alternative to a mechanical time clock- because they’re fully programmable to the conditions of the specific box.

Why they were connected to the internet is probably because corporate wanted to be able to mess with it without sending someone in person. The stated reason was probably so they could set passwords but in reality it was to make in house maintenance personnel’s lives easier.

There's a lot of value in things like alerts, too. Being able to send someone an text message or even call someone when a glycol loop herps the derp can be a 10k-100k dollar value proposition, and pulling good logging data about current draw can give you warning months before actual death about a failing motor or compressor.

That said, the idea of inbound open ports for management is mind-boggling, even for hardware in the 2000s era. Even before you get to the security ramifications, it's just an absolute nightmare trying to get fifty sites to stick with static IP addresses, inform you when changing ISPs or modifying firewall configurations, or your DDNS provider changes literally anything. I know OT has worse practices than IT, but this one is pretty mind-boggling.

Forget setting up VPNs. Buy and configure a single main operational server, have the hardware send regular updates there, move all the heavy lifting and the UI somewhere you can control if and limit firmware updates to message protocols, certificates, and fundamentals. Allow big customers to buy, run, and redirect to their own server if they really need to own everything. Done. Two or three months work for an intern. I hate Everything Is The Cloud, but this is a tailormade situation for just putting things on the cloud.

They had inbound open ports to allow their maintenance managers to change settings store managers were messing with, probably. But why they didn’t take security precautions to prevent that I don’t know. Probably because they’re career hvac techs and it doesn’t occur to them that someone would want a freezer to stop working.

What were the hackers after? Ransom ware?

What were the hackers after? Ransom ware?

Seems like pure destruction to me, most likely from a nation state (who else would have motive, means, and opportunity?). Maybe it's retaliation for that Russian bot farm that got blown up?

Destruction and/or criminality. Next time someone in corporate HQ gets an email about "set up a crypto account to pay us $$$$ or else we shut your stores down", they'll know this isn't a spam email or pointless threat.

A practice run for the Chinese hackers who've already infiltrated much of American infrastructure.

MO seems more Russian than Chinese, Iranian is also technically possible. But I agree that hostile nation-state is the most likely motive.

It's still weird that the guy building the web interface would do it, even if he was a career HVAC tech that had gotten pushed into software dev. But it's plausible.

What were the hackers after? Ransom ware?

That's a fun thought. Ransomware naively feels a little weird for me. Telling the people they need to pay you gives them a window to replace the controllers (or just turn off internet access and hope you didn't leave a time bomb). But I may be missing an attack vector there, or they might have been working toward the timebomb and just noticed enough devices they got interrupted.

There's some more esoteric options, though. Hitting food supplies is famously one a target for causing political unrest. Just shorting a few of the supermarkets would potentially be a very remunerative option, though it'd be a hilarious way for the hackers to get caught (or lose money). Burning Danfoss itself might be a thing, especially for the more ideological actors -- even if the threat genuinely doesn't exist for their newer products (not a given), there's no way its buyers avoid a security audit, and no way Danfoss avoids a ton of support costs downstream of that, on top of lost goodwill. Political or nationalist drives are always an option, if a goofy one. "Hey, Look At Me" or a personal grudge turned public is just plain dumb, but if any attack could be executed by a script kiddy, this one could.

Not sure some other options.

Seems to me that the smarter way to do this would be to have a site-to-site VPN between your corporate office and the store's internal network. Then the freezers remain on the "internal" corporate network and aren't exposed to the internet.

This may be shocking to professional software engineers, but most companies do not put systems on a VPN prior to those systems being hacked.

I guess a lot depends on when the system was put together, but as a professional I.T. guy, oof. Of course you put them on the VPN! That's been the sane choice for at least twenty years. If you absolutely, positively can't for some reason, then you at least whitelist the control server at the firewall level and block other traffic to the device.

Now if they were small enough not to have an I.T. department, I'd understand. But more likely I.T. was overruled.

It was probably put together by career HVAC techs who told them to set up communication via a web portal so they could initiate defrosts* on their cellphones, and then set the passwords to their lastnames.

*For those in the back who don't know, commercial freezers are supposed to have an electronic defrost that clears ice off the evaporator so it doesn't inhibit airflow. This attack worked by reprogramming that defrost to never end.

Yes but that does require more infrastructure. It's also very possible that the units connect to a manufacturer cloud controller on the Internet only on outbound connections, which is typically reasonably secure so long as you use SSL pinning etc, or even on an IPSEC tunnel, but that the cloud controller was itself compromised in some way.

The manual for one of the affected models is available online, see page 11. The idea of a web host running on the hardware controller is... not the worst thing I've ever done, but :

"If the remote connection is on a WAN then the LAN router may need to be configured to allow this inbound counnection, with the addition of the web port added tot he end of the http string."

Definitely worse. I was building web-accessible hardware in 2013. This was, to be fair, a couple years pre-Let's Encrypt, and SSL wouldn't have solved this specific problem.

But I still knew better than that.

Early descriptions of the attack have claimed that there was a master password for the device exposed on the same interface (unclear if it's the HTTP or XML), which allowed the control commands through in bulk.

All of these manuals are online for technicians to read.

Oh my, that is indeed dire.

Geez, page 60 has a default admin password of 12345... There's a decent chance they just used that and then clicked the defrost button. It's fortunate that the attackers appear to have been unsophisticated, apparently you can also remotely upload new firmware and they don't describe any verification or signature validation.

Or maybe half a step more sophisticated they got VPN creds for the grocery store from a data breach or something, I doubt they were just sitting accessible on the internet. That's the sort of thing Shodan would have flagged years ago.

And right next to the default password:

To guarantee the best experience when connecting to your AK-SC, ensure you [sic] PC has the latest version of Adobe® Flash®

Yes, all of that stuff is absolutely industry standard- because most of these freezers are worked on by contractors with an end user who don’t know nothing about nothing and they need a default admin password.

Their main competitor is even worse.

The default admin password would be common in normal IT world until 2020: it took a combination of California law (2018's SB-327) and NIST's mandate, along with some questionably-authorized-by-statute contracting pressures, that really made it universal for routers. I'll still see it (or password) on internal-only equipment, including some still-being-sold-as-new Unifi devices.

It's not even necessarily wrong in an environment where you'd expect some intrusion detection, or where the device requires a change on first login. It's just bizarre to do it, and then recommend people forward a WAN directly. This particular attack seems to have depending on another, different 'master' password, so I guess it doesn't even matter, but that's another thing that on its own points to 'reasonable if you're not that concerned about horizontal movement' (common in 2013) and really bad if you have any reason to worry about being the first hop in an infection.

Like, I'd hope they have fail2ban or equivalent set up? But I wouldn't be optimistic.

The competitor being worse makes me really concerned.

You are aware these are freezers, right? Like they're important but they're not holding onto private data or whatever.

Emerson writes the password on the device for technicians to have access to, and Ke2therm uses all fives(no, it can't be changed).

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