Retailers in the European Union have once again woken up to disaster, after a second wave of cyber attacks targeting supermarket and grocery refrigerators occurred early on Monday morning.
Stores in Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg were impacted, with food spoiled and requiring disposal in many cases.
Rickard Nilsson, store manager of an Ica supermarket franchise in the Swedish town of Sjöbo, was one of many employees forced to throw away “hundreds of thousands of Kronor worth of food”, according to reporting by TV4.
“They have been in and adjusted the temperatures in the refrigerators and freezers,” Nilsson told the broadcaster.
“We can’t adjust the temperatures, we can’t change them. Heat is blowing into the freezers. Everything is ruined.”
The attacks come weeks after a similar incident impacted more than 700 stores and locations in France, and so far, no culprit has either come forward to claim the attacks or been identified by authorities.
“It is not known who is behind this attack, and it may never be possible to identify them,” a spokesman for the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium told Recorded Future.
Christiaan Beek, vice president of threat analytics at cyber security firm Rapid7, said he and his team have been studying the hardware controllers linked to the first wave of attacks.
“We’ve been looking into the Danfoss refrigeration controllers following the recent supermarket attacks. Our latest search identifies 950+ internet-facing hosts associated with Danfoss StoreView interfaces, including systems accessible through nonstandard ports,” Beek told Cyber Daily.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean 950+ vulnerable controllers, and we haven’t yet verified their firmware versions. I would be cautious about claims that millions of vulnerable controllers are directly exposed online. The available research points to thousands of identifiable management interfaces, although individual controllers can manage multiple refrigeration units.”
Alex Nehmy, field chief technology officer for Asia-Pacific at Dragos, said that operational technology, such as supermarket fridges, is often invisible to most, “until it goes wrong”.
“Refrigeration controllers, like many xOT devices, are critical infrastructure in our food supply chain. This incident shows how reliant we are on these devices to maintain our way of life,” he said.
“We must ensure these critical xOT devices have the cyber security hygiene necessary to ensure they are resilient to cyber attacks.”
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