Are your freezers safe? Military commissary refrigeration cyberattack probe, French supermarkets systems crash raise fears

It's high time that one might be careful about his or her digitally controlled or AI-run freezer. Apprehensions have been raised after two high-profile instances. Hundreds of supermarkets in France suffered refrigeration controls malfunction. Pentagon has also initiated a probe into similar freezer failure incidents at U.S. military commissaries in August.

Pentagon was probing to ascertain whether the commissary failures were acts of cyberattack or not. In Frnace, two supermarkets suffered around USD 300,000, Forbes reported.

While, it is too premature to connect both incidents as well as term them suspected cyberattacks. Hackers targetted hundreds of supermarkets in France, took control of the freezer systems and increased the temperatures to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, damaging food and leading to fire incidents.

The late August malfunctions in the United States affected at least six commissaries — on-base stores where military personnel buy their food — according to a Reuters review of the military bases' contemporaneous Facebook posts and website updates. In at least one of the cases, the freezers did not simply stop working; the cooling units' temperatures were cranked up overnight, yielding mounds of wilted or melted food in the morning.

The Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Facebook account explained on August 26 that its freezer "went into defrost mode where it heated up all the food. Trust us when we say it was 'spoiled.'"

The US Army Criminal Investigation Division said its Cyber Field Office was involved in the investigation and that it was working with French law enforcement to better understand "the refrigeration outages in Europe."

The French hack involved cranking the temperature inside the units up rather than merely knocking them offline, similar to what happened in Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Some French refrigeration units had the temperature turned up so high they caught fire.

Are Hackers Targetting Freezer or Refrigeration?

Refrigeration plays a critical role in the distribution of fresh food and the sabotage of cold storage facilities over the internet has long been seen as a nightmare scenario, alongside the loss of electricity or water plants.

Earlier this year, the Global Food Safety Initiative, an industry body, called on food safety professionals and IT leaders to work together to ensure "robust cybersecurity" for refrigeration technology, noting that "a hacked cooling system is just as dangerous as a broken one."

Hackers have previously sabotaged fridges and freezers both in the United States and elsewhere.