French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack(www.rnz.co.nz)
32 pointsby billybuckwheat4 hours ago7 comments
  • grebc3 hours ago
    I can fathom the product losses from this one incident would outweigh all the imaginary reasons people tell themselves for why monitoring/connected/smart devices are useful in their work/home.

    Definitely won’t stop anyone buying though is the saddest part.

    • skybrian3 hours ago
      When a freezer stops working and nobody notices for a while, the food will spoil then, too.

      If it were monitoring-only, rather than connected to the power, it would probably be fine.

      • grebc3 hours ago
        It’s a supermarket, staff will be stocktaking, restocking, walking past A LOT.
        • skybrian3 hours ago
          True, but they'd need to be specifically checking a thermometer or it might warm up a fair bit before being noticed.
          • otherme1232 hours ago
            Any industrial fridge, even many home fridges, have a sound alarm if some temperature threshold is reached. It is trivial to _send_ alerts if the threshold is crossed. What is less common is remote control.

            E.g. the -80°C's in our lab are all naturally air gapped: the monitoring system is send-only.

          • kulahan3 hours ago
            It’s kind of a low-grade risk though, don’t you think? I imagine it’s unlikely we’d see major changes over “some stores lost a few hundred grand due to a cyber attack”.

            I suppose it could expand, but even still, there’s plenty of non-perishable foods. It would be annoying at worst, but maybe never outright dangerous?

            • pixl972 hours ago
              It is not a low grade risk at all, these represent extreme health risks to the customer.

              It may be some time before staff notices a unit is heating up. And if customers aren't paying attention and grab something biologically fragile like milk they could get food poisoning that could hospitalize you for days.

      • shlip3 hours ago
        Well "a" (aka 1) freezer malfunctionning will let a few items spoil. Hundreds of connected appliances nation wide, that's a different story.

        They had been able to manage just fine for several decades before internet of shits happened.

        Fear not for them though, they'll go whine under the government's noze and get a refund. So much for the liberalism they praise when everything is fine for them.

    • zamadatix2 hours ago
      I can fathom these have caught more failures than they've caused for these supermarkets, not counting the other ways they use smart devices. If there's a sad part to be found it's in single points of failure but even that may not be far off cost optimal in the long run.

      But the way you find out which kind of scenario is by getting the loss and savings data and comparing it, not wondering what could be true and declaring it be the saddest one.

  • celticninja3 hours ago
    I remember someone positing that something similar had happened to fridges on US army bases
  • gpvos3 hours ago
    There was also an, as far as is known, unrelated cyberattack on Dutch supermarket chain AH, which has had to suspend activity at some of its distribution centres.
    • depworker3 hours ago
      Amsterdam will starve a bit these days, rest of the Netherlands has no supermarket monoculture.
  • seydor3 hours ago
    Are you sure they weren't just running backup nodes for Pied Piper's decentralized internet?
  • Charly_HW3 hours ago
    why so many dupes from this incident?