Who needs a state to attack the food supply? · ↗ www.france24.com

Hundreds of supermarkets in France suffered a cyberattack that heated freezers and fridges up to 50°C, sparking fires and mass food spoilage. Grocery stores from the conglomerate Ahold Delhaize operating in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg also suffered a security incident around the same time, affecting its online app, delivery system, and electronic price tags. There is currently no indication whether these attacks were related.

The refrigeration units in the French supermarkets were from manufacturer Danfoss, which claims the affected units were “running outdated firmware”. Back in August, Claroty’s Team82 announced a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to perform just such an attack on refrigeration units using a remote web interface, although there is no indication so far that this specific vulnerability was exploited in this case.

Why are supermarket fridges connected to the internet in the first place? Remote monitoring and maintenance, apparently. But this also massively increases the attack surface, not just of individual stores and their profit margins, but of the food supply itself.

An uncomfortable reality is that a lot of critical infrastructure is more vulnerable than we would hope. Could this attack be a rehearsal for a larger attack by a hostile state or well-organized terrorist group? It reminds me a bit of the mysterious 2013 Metcalf sniper attack, in which unidentified gunmen cut communications cables and seriously damaged 17 transformers at a California electrical substation, then disappeared without a trace. Some feared it was just preparation for a larger attack that thankfully never came.

The scarier possibility is that this wasn’t an attack by a hostile state or organized terror group. AI is rapidly lowering the bar for expertise required to discover software vulnerabilities. These tools have proven extremely adept at reverse-engineering firmware and software, such as the recent advances in PS5 emulation and Adobe suite cloning, as well as autonomously discovering vulnerabilities.

We don’t know who carried out the French attack, or whether AI played any role. But the frightening takeaway is that the list of possible suspects is longer than it’s ever been.

Maybe let’s rethink whether fridges need to be connected to the internet, huh?