FREEZER HACK. MELTDOWN AISLE.

The real news

The story, straight

Your freezer keeps food cold. A controller is the box that manages that cooling.

When that box is reachable over the public internet, attackers may be able to reach it too. In this attack, hackers turned temperatures up.

Food spoiled.

Humanity connected dessert to the internet. Dessert would like to unsubscribe.

Reuters reports that stores in 8 European countries threw away vast quantities of food after Monday's attacks. A similar wave hit dozens of French supermarkets 3 weeks earlier.

European supermarkets were rushing to strengthen their systems on Tuesday.

Sweden's ICA reported 23 affected stores, whose equipment sat outside its centrally managed store network. Coop reported 7 affected stores and said their refrigeration systems had been disconnected from the internet.

This isn't a story about stolen payment cards or a ransom demand: Reuters reports neither. The attackers' identity and motive are not established.

The useful lesson is less glamorous than the word hacking. Deloitte cybersecurity expert Frank Groenewegen advises checking whether controllers are vulnerable, publicly reachable, updated and still supported by their manufacturers.

Removing public internet access isolates the equipment; it does not repair the underlying flaw.

Many stores are independently run, with different refrigeration systems. That makes this a store-by-store job, not a magic update for an entire industry.

Lil'meme's contribution: shovelling melted ice cream into a waffle cone. The emergency response has become a toppings bar.

Keep the cooling connected to electricity. Stop giving strangers an internet route to its controls.

Repost so dessert can retire from tech support.

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