The cyberattacks on commercial refrigerators and freezers in Europe continue, as a slew of grocery stores in Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Sweden report widespread food wastage as a result of miscreants raising the temperatures to highs of 50ºC (122°F).
In Belgium, around 40 Delhaize stores were affected after the attackers reportedly switched fridges and freezers into defrost mode overnight, between Sunday and Monday, resulting in stock issues.
Diego Louwers, a Proxy Delhaize store manager in Overijse, near Brussels, told RTL Info that the consequences of the cyberattacks were “catastrophic,” forcing the store to throw out the entirety of its fresh and frozen products.
“We can’t have anything worse in our line of work,” he said. “We have to throw away all of our merchandise, and it’s both heartbreaking and very complicated operationally.”
A Delhaize spokesperson said it took steps to ensure stores remain stocked, although fresh and frozen products are “temporarily somewhat limited.”
I rather want to trot out The Onion’s recurring hed of “no way to stop this” on mass shootings. We seriously had this happen a month ago, and these stores still decided remote control of cooling systems was a grand idea.
How did we ever exist without our fridges not being connected to the internet!
I posted this the first time around:
Looking after your fridge is not a problem when you just have one fridge. You open it one day, oh shit it’s not working, you get it fixed. Done.
Companies have hundreds of stores each with 10 or more fridges in them. Nobody in the store is keeping tabs on whether the temperature is set correctly to meet food standards, or whether the condenser is blocking up and full of fluff, or a bunch of other maintenance and administrative stuff associated with owning a bunch of fridges.
Solution? Remote reporting and management. You can keep an eye on all 5000 of them 24/7, alert the store if there’s an alarm, call maintenance when there’s a failure , etc etc etc.
The only mistakes made here is that they didn’t put their fridges on a secured internal network, and they didn’t update the software when Danfoss said they should .
With giant blocks of ice, of course!