alt Hacker NewsFrench supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack
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What genius decided to connect a fridge to the Internet? Make him pay the losses.
By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.
These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
I remember working on my car when I lived in an apartment. I'd take my tools out into the parking lot, and get to work. If I needed to use the potty, or get a snack, or whatever, I had to pack up the tools and take them inside. Then out again. It really stinks.
I currently live in a high trust neighborhood where I don't need to be present with anything outside.
It's so much better.
On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.
People never learn:
https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...
So tossing out an idea:
What if all manufacturers had to classify their product into internet connected i.e. smart or not. We mandate that manufacturer has to support updates for minimum 5 years or firmware source goes public. Have them put firmware source in escrow as well as have a way to update it.
If a manufacturer wants to reduce their liability then they have to release something to make it semi publicly supportable. With AI agents these days patching the firmware might one day be trivial.
Put some penalities with teeth behind this and maybe manufacturers will think twice before making everything smart.
Here's a fix:
if(temp > 5) return;
I think it's important to see if this could happen on a larger scale. What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints of food worldwide? What would happen to food prices?
The same happened to a major Dutch supermarket chain.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
Maybe the agent swarm passed its “warmth” eval.
This is literally everything that's wrong with the modern tech industry in a nutshell:
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
They sell fricken refrigerators for God's sake. Maybe I can understand planned obsolescence for a cell phone, but a fridge? And especially to grocery stores that operate on razor thin margins to begin with, the idea that they'll just dump their old working refrigerators because the manufacturer refused security updates is a guaranteed recipe for stuff like this.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?
This is terrible. But, at the same time, why now? This seems like something you'd want to hold onto for use later as a nation state. And there's no money to be made here since you can't really ransom it. Was this just a petty attack to scare the public?
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
How in the name of fuck was a fridge even designed to be able to heat itself to 50 degrees C?
Please, let this be the stone that starts the avalanche of consumers rejecting smart apppliances.
My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just can’t help themselves apparently.
[dead]
These incidents will bring back the appeal for dumb appliances, hopefully.
Instead of climate change, let's call it "cyber change"...the rise of hacks of all kinds facilitated by AI
Same (an outage) happened to the US military commissary system https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-09-01/army-cid-inve...