Hackers hit retail refrigerators and freezers in seven European countries this week, and Alex Pearce noticed the first sign in London when the defrost light came on refrigeration unit 2 and the panel read 150C.
He unplugged the cable linking the units to the internet after suspecting a cyber-attack. Pearce said: "If it had happened on a Saturday morning, when I don’t tend to be here, it could ultimately have led to a fire".
Belgium to Sweden
Retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported similar refrigeration problems on the same day. In some shops, refrigerators and freezers soared to as high as 50C, which is high enough to turn a connected cooling system into a physical safety issue rather than just an IT problem.
Binance and Ukraine
The refrigeration attack landed in the middle of a short run of major cyber incidents. The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, was robbed of $6.3bn on 30 October, and hackers targeted Ukraine’s emergency alert app on 1 November and sent people in Kyiv a fake nuclear strike alert.
Richard Horne said the UK was in the foothills of a new hacking landscape. He also said, "There are so many vulnerabilities out there that … you could say are waiting to be exploited."
Alex Pearce and the NCSC
The NCSC said last week that AI-powered malicious software was highly likely to be used in hacking attacks against the UK’s power stations, airports and hospitals by 2028, and that AI would help attackers scout targets, locate weaknesses in IT networks and write malicious code. The fridge attacks are being treated as possible cyber-operations, but the incident still leaves the same practical question for retailers with networked cooling gear: who got in, and through what software path.
French supermarket fridges were attacked last month in what could have been a trial run, and Pearce’s morning round shows how quickly a remote problem becomes a local one when a connected unit starts heating instead of cooling.
