On the night of October 11 somebody logged into the refrigeration controllers at hundreds of French supermarkets and turned the cold cases into ovens. Fridges at Intermarché, Carrefour, Coopérative U and Monoprix ran up to 122 degrees for about six hours. Food spoiled by the ton, a few stores caught fire, and the chains lost tens of millions.
The next morning Ahold Delhaize, which owns Stop & Shop, Food Lion, Hannaford and Giant, pulled its systems offline for a security incident. Nobody has tied the two together. Nobody needs to.
Your meat case has an IP address. The refrigeration panels can be reached over the internet. In France the attackers used that door, set the defrost cycle from one hour to eight so no alarm fired, and let the cases warm overnight. One vendor’s controllers ran the cold aisles in every chain hit, so one way in reached hundreds of stores. The same controller brands sit in American stores, and nobody has a fix because the hole hasn’t been named.
Spoiled stock in 300 stores pulled the regional warehouse into replacement mode, and the stores that weren’t hacked got shorted on the next truck.
The risk for your family is a week’s worth of food that lives in somebody else’s refrigerator.
This week: build a 72-hour pantry that needs no refrigerator. Keep the chest freezer full and put a thermometer in it. Put a second grocer on your route that isn’t the big chain.
Today’s SITREP has the warning signs and the full breakdown. 🧊