Hackers hijacked supermarket refrigerators and freezers in Europe on Monday and sabotaged the machines, the latest salvo in a wave of mysterious cyberattacks that has also targeted commissaries on U.S. military bases.
Monday’s attacks in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland and Estonia match those the Department of Defense is investigating after widespread freezer outages hit several domestic military bases in August and again in October.
One military official told NextGov.com that a freezer located at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, was turned to “defrost” mode and caused all of its food items to go to waste.
People were interested in these podcasts
The latest wave follows a similar attack last month in France, when hackers sent temperatures soaring in hundreds of supermarkets and independent stores.
Nikita Shah, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who specializes in cyber threats and cybersecurity, said that the attacks in the U.S. and Europe had “some very similar” signatures to them.
“Finding out who’s behind these things is a very complex technical process and it can take months,” Ms. Shah told The Washington Times. She described the attacks as waves, citing the similar attacks against U.S. military bases, against France in mid-October and now the rest of Europe.
As the cyberattacks have spread, concerns of sabotage have grown as supermarkets in at least seven countries have seen refrigerators and freezers set to malfunction.
Christophe Hansen, the European Union’s food and agriculture commissioner, warned that it appears to be a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain.”
“Some of this has a political tinge to it,” Ms. Shah said. “A Russia-linked actor doing this to kind of send a psychological message because the thing they’re really doing is information warfare.”
Ms. Shah pointed out that many of the countries that have experienced the cyberattacks are also supporters of Ukraine and may have participated in the recent funding of a major purchase of Patriot missiles for Ukraine from the U.S.
In Belgium, the government decided the freezer attacks constituted a national security incident, prompting its federal intelligence and security services to step in as part of investigations.
Multiple European news outlets have reported that some supermarkets are struggling to contend with the attack, with some incapable of changing the temperature settings on their own equipment.
The internet-connected appliances were relatively unprotected, according to many of the shop owners, and the Associated Press has reported the cyberattacks appear to be targeting old systems.
“It sounds like it was some pretty basic technical vulnerabilities,” Ms. Shah said. “It just kind of speaks to the age-old problem that we have in cybersecurity of very important or critical systems still not having the basic measures in place.”
The Pentagon’s Cyber Command and law enforcement agencies within the department are looking into the freezer outages at U.S. military bases from August and October. It is still unclear if the same actors attacked both the freezers on U.S. military bases and those in European grocery stores.
Many of the cyberattacks at the European supermarkets are finding that technologies that would normally be critical were highly exposed and vulnerable to cyber threats that have simply never emerged until recently.
Ms. Shah said that it appeared that many of the attacks were against equipment where “basic software vulnerabilities hadn’t been patched over time and also had very weak security measure in place.” She described those weak measures as things like “guessable passwords or weak authentication practices.”
Attacks on hardware systems that control industrial devices and infrastructure are known as operational technology, or OT, and in the past have required specialized knowledge as hardware coding was specific to each device and use case.
An increase in OT attacks is also raising concerns that election machines and devices around election security in the U.S. could be at risk.
Earlier this year, suspected Iranian hackers targeted dozens of water utilities in the U.S., locking administrators out of their systems and forcing shutdowns. It is unclear whether the outages are directly connected, but those attacks fell into a similar category.
“It seems like signaling,” Ms. Shah said. “A lot of this kind of sabotage has the intent to send some kind of message.”
Recent cyberattacks in the days leading up to Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections match warnings this summer from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that election season would bring more attacks.
The FBI and CISA wrote in a public service announcement last month that hackers and adversaries now leverage AI in their work to make it much more effective, whether they are attempting the alleged cyberattacks on freezers or the more advanced attacks on election officials and systems.
“It’s like a cyber-enabled information operation,” Ms. Shah said on Monday. “There’s always some kind of political angle to it. Tomorrow is a big day in the U.S.”
A report published in July by CISA wrote that assessments “repeatedly show that the IT networks operated by [state, local, tribal and territorial] election offices lack cybersecurity hygiene.”
In their mid-October public service announcement the FBI and CISA published that “cyber threat actors” would try to target election officials as the midterms drew closer. They said that artificial intelligence chatbots and coding platforms now make bad actors exceptionally dangerous.
AI has allowed hackers to start using “convincing deepfake video and audio recordings” using these deepfakes “to create new identities, steal the identities of real people, create realistic facsimiles of daily life and communication” to aid their attacks, a risk for election officials, according to the FBI and CISA.
The public service announcement said that hackers would look to “steal user data, including login credentials and sensitive information” from election officials, candidates and political organizations to try and access the voter registration information and other sensitive lists.
“With a lot of this, what the hackers are trying to do is demonstrate that reach into a homeland,” Ms. Shah said. “Just to show that ability to undermine the state in that particular country, to show ‘Look, they’re not as capable of protecting you as you thought.’”
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.