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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19075 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It said its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 fridge regulator systems were notably affected, with a version of the former using "outdated firmware".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.

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.

My house has smart lights in it. I decided to try pairing them to my phone in case I have time to ever want to change their color one day.

After connecting the app tells me some of the bulbs need a firmware update. Light bulbs need firmware updates these days, apparently.

So yes of course supermarket refrigeration systems also need firmware updates.

While I'm generally in the camp of having as little "smart" appliances as possible due to the obvious problems with hacking, currently I'm curious about going entirely the other way: IF your appliance is already smart anyway, why not run an oversight AI whose sole job is verifying that the appliance runs as intended and which just stops any weird behaviour like the extended defrosting here? Surely some companies will find a way to fuck this up and make the AI itself hackable, but at least in principle this would obviate the need to patch every possible exploit or weakness; As long as the AI is unaffected, it can just overrule obvious nonsense.

And you can go even further, at least once costs have crashed far enough: Imagine each AI just building a custom codebase for its particular appliance, which they only minimally expose to the outside, so that not only are no exploits reusable, even just finding exploits is a completely uneconomical Hacking Blind nightmare.

The future is going to be fucking weird, and scary.

Yes you are right. I should actually put an AI on making sure my smart lights and other smart garbage are patched, even if I don't want to use the smart features, just to stop from being a malware vector into my house..

In fact I remember my refrigerator had a little QR code in the bottom right corner next to the make and model that told me to configure WiFi.

Why does my refrigerator have Wi-Fi? No idea. Do I want this feature? No. Should I configure it anyway and keep it updated and lock it to an AP that can't do anything? Yes.

Sigh.

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