Hundreds of supermarkets in France hacked! The temperature in the freezer rises to 50 degrees in the middle of the night, and all the fresh produce is spoiled and on fire

Hundreds of supermarkets in France have been subjected to cyber attacks by hackers. Hackers remotely changed the operating parameters of supermarket refrigerators and freezers, causing the temperature of the equipment originally used for preservation to rise all the way to 50 degrees Celsius. The high temperature in some supermarkets lasted for about 6 hours.

Due to remote control by hackers, a large amount of fresh and frozen food stored in the supermarket has all gone bad, resulting in significant losses. Not only that, multiple supermarket stores have also reported fires. Currently, local police and relevant departments are investigating.

According to Reuters, the supermarket brands affected this time include Intermarch é, Coop é relative U, Carrefour and other large chains. Among them, Intermarch é Group confirmed that about 150 of its stores were affected, and Carrefour also said that 80 stores had broken down. In addition, several large retail chains have also suffered varying degrees of losses.

In order to prevent food safety issues and for the health of customers, the affected supermarkets can only empty and throw away all the food in the faulty equipment. Because meat, dairy products, and various frozen foods, once stored at temperatures exceeding safety standards, indicate that the 'cold chain' has broken. These foods are prone to bacterial growth and even toxin production, and should never be given to humans again.

How did hackers turn a freezer into an oven? Originally, hackers exploited a common technical vulnerability in supermarkets nowadays. In order to facilitate maintenance, many supermarkets' industrial refrigeration systems are connected to the Internet and equipped with intelligent control software. In this way, technicians can remotely check the temperature and adjust settings in the background without having to go to the store.

But this convenient remote management also has its drawbacks, leaving opportunities for hackers. As long as hackers crack and enter the control system, they can easily change the device parameters. According to preliminary investigations, the hackers mainly modified the "automatic defrosting" function that comes with industrial refrigerators. This function was originally designed to periodically provide brief local heating to the device to melt the frost inside, and then automatically restore cooling and refrigeration after defrosting.

Hackers used malicious means to prolong the heating process, causing the defrosting program to continue heating for several hours before the device temperature rose to 50 degrees. Worse still, hackers specifically choose to attack in the middle of the night. At that time, most supermarkets had already closed and there were no on duty personnel to detect and stop them in a timely manner, so the damage was very serious.

At present, investigators are focusing on the refrigeration management system of Danfoss, Denmark. Danfoss is a globally renowned manufacturer of industrial equipment control technology. The company has confirmed its knowledge of this matter and stated that the supermarket equipment involved is using outdated firmware, which is embedded software that controls the operation of the hardware.

Danfoss emphasized that they have repeatedly reminded customers to update security patches in a timely manner and eliminate outdated equipment. However, further investigation is still being conducted into the vulnerabilities through which hackers entered the system.

Now, the Paris prosecutor's office has officially opened a case and launched a criminal investigation. The French government has also dispatched the French National Cybersecurity Agency to assist in solving the case. At the same time, French authorities are closely cooperating with other European countries to verify whether this hacker attack has affected businesses in other European countries.

This incident has alerted the global industrial community. Now more and more industrial equipment is connected to the Internet, and network security vulnerabilities are likely to directly damage offline physical facilities. Not only will it cause significant economic losses, but it will also paralyze the basic services that people need on a daily basis. In France, hackers only modified the system to keep food fresh, causing the entire fresh food area of multiple supermarkets to be paralyzed.