Hackers have forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50C overnight, in an “unprecedented” cyber-attack affecting several hundred stores across the country, with fires and food losses reported.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday the large-scale attack was “affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France”. Reported damage included “food losses and fires”, it added.
The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, instructed France’s national cybersecurity agency ANSSI to investigate, a person in his office said.
France “was coordinating with its European counterparts, as other countries may also be affected”, while also investigating whether any other French firms were at risk, they said.
I work in manufacturing, and the trend there is that most machine suppliers will deliver a machine with it’s own PLC where the programming is walled off. They then offer you subscription based support, where they can connect remote through vpn or with a router/5G connection. You need tech-savvy managers to understand the huge risk this carries. Fortunately, lots of people are waking up in Europe due to the NIS2 directive.