YHK - yet another hacker news clone

French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack

23 points billybuckwheat 1 hour ago 12 comments

celticninja 1 hour ago | parent

I remember someone positing that something similar had happened to fridges on US army bases

grebc 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

skybrian 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

grebc 32 minutes ago | parent

It’s a supermarket, staff will be stocktaking, restocking, walking past A LOT.

skybrian 20 minutes ago | parent

True, but they'd need to be specifically checking a thermometer or it might warm up a fair bit before being noticed.

kulahan 7 minutes ago | parent

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?

shlip 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

gpvos 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

depworker 15 minutes ago | parent

Amsterdam will starve a bit these days, rest of the Netherlands has no supermarket monoculture.

seydor 22 minutes ago | parent

Are you sure they weren't just running backup nodes for Pied Piper's decentralized internet?

Charly_HW 20 minutes ago | parent

why so many dupes from this incident?