Hundreds of French supermarkets got hit with a cyberattack that turned their refrigerators into ovens. The fridges heated to 122°F. Food spoiled. Fires started. Someone hacked grocery stores to make them worse at being grocery stores.
This is the cyber equivalent of breaking into a bank to fill the vault with Monopoly money. Pure vandalism. No ransom demand. No data theft. Just fridges running hot enough to cook a brisket. The hackers saw France's entire retail cold chain and thought "let's make this warm."
122°F is the temperature you sous vide chicken at for four hours. It is not the temperature you store yogurt at. French shoppers showed up for their morning baguette and left with pre-heated camembert and a structure fire. The dairy aisle became a health code violation with ambition.
Security experts will call this a wake-up call about critical infrastructure vulnerabilities. They will write white papers. They will sell consulting packages. None of them will address the actual question, which is why a supermarket refrigerator has an internet connection in the first place. Your fridge does not need to receive firmware updates. It needs to be cold. That is the entire job description.
Some IT director in Paris is currently explaining to his CEO how the same network that tracks customer loyalty points also controls the compressors. He will not have that job by Friday. The CEO will not have his job by the following Friday. The consultant who sold them on IoT-enabled cold storage already cashed his check and moved to Monaco.
Retail traders saw the news and immediately started researching French grocery chains to short. They do not know which companies were affected. They do not know if those companies are publicly traded. They will lose money anyway, because that is what they do. The hackers at least managed to ruin some cheese. Retail traders can't even get that right.
Photo by @felkhadri on Unsplash
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