Symbolic imagePentagon treats base freezer failures as suspected cyberattack after French supermarket sabotage
Reuters reports, citing officials, that the Pentagon suspects a cyberattack behind freezer malfunctions at military bases. It follows the sabotage of refrigeration in French supermarkets on 11 and 12 October.
Reuters published the report as an exclusive on Thursday, 29 October. Only its headline was available to Bota, so the number of bases and any suspected culprit are unknown. In France, supermarket refrigeration units heated up to as much as 50C overnight from Sunday 11 to Monday 12 October, according to the Financial Times, spoiling food and starting fires in several stores. Le Monde puts the number of affected supermarkets at over 700. The FT counts over 150 Intermarché and Netto, 80 Coopérative U and about 80 Carrefour stores, plus scattered Monoprix and E Leclerc.
Remote access to Danfoss controllers
Most stores used a Danfoss central controller reachable remotely, the FT reports. Danfoss had flagged one product line as vulnerable a year and a half earlier and issued updates, and Cert-FR warned of active attacks the morning after. France's ANSSI has not confirmed how the attackers got in.
Cost and lessons
Intermarché's CEO says the attack will cost tens of millions of euros. In Le Monde, geopolitics professor Frédérick Douzet argues that identical software in all stores multiplied the damage, and that some devices were obsolete and no longer received security updates.