Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

fzeindl

Great. We already waste a ton of food, let’s destroy even more.

kotaKat

... Feels like deja vu. Didn't the US military just have this happen at its military exchanges... a month or two ago? Yes, yes they did. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/... "ALL freezers went into defrost mode – ALL frozen food has spoiled".

47282847

Fridge attack! We live sci-fi indeed! %-)

gessha

“Got another blackout in Santo Domingo. Netrunners are at it again, poking holes in the power grid!”

robthebrew

TomsHardware hit? I'm getting spinning beachballs on this link

alexdrdr

Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case

ex-aws-dude

Why is that even internet enabled? If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?

lemoncookiechip

Why is this even connected to the internet. If you want to monitor it remotely, you can set that independently from the actual controls.

StableAlkyne

There is so much needless connection to the internet nowadays; this is the end result of a decade of shoving IoT into everything. Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?

MisterMunchkin

Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet. It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.

renyicircle

> Connecting your case controller to the internet offers further opportunities to generate savings. If you can diagnose issues and control the case remotely, service engineers needn’t be called out to simple situations like starting a defrost. And being able to compare performance and efficiency across an entire estate of stores makes it easy to spot patterns and make incremental efficiency gains. ( https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/articles/dcs/... ) I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".

pjmlp

Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.

AndrewThrowaway

My first idea was "who the hell needs connected fridges". Then I remembered that both my AC and floor heating are connected. A hacker could easily turn on both AC and floor heating and cause me a few euros of damages in my electricity bill.

anilakar

> cyberattack, which has hit Danfoss-made refrigeration controls Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now. The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.

fennecfoxy

I wonder if AI would have helped in this situation. For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human. I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application. "But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...

hn_submit

I feel no pity for them at all. If they're too stupid to secure their fridges (which seem to be accessible over the internet) than that's their deserved pain.

cataflam

Looks like that specific vulnerability was found this summer, disclosed in coordination with the vendor and at least some models were patched [0] (unclear if all models were), but from early reports: - they either didn't warn their customers this was a critical security patch, - many of these fridges/freezers were directly accessible on the internet with their own 3G/4F SIM cards without further protection! Crazy stuff [0] https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...

interloxia

Freeze the Controller, Defrost the Food: Uncovering Vulnerabilities in Danfoss Refrigeration Controllers Amir Zaltzman / August 9th, 2026 https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...

bronco21016

This is pretty interesting as the Danfoss vulnerability was suspected to be related to a similar situation that occurred across US military bases in late August 2026. https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack... Could this be the same group? Or someone inspired by reading that article? Or just entirely unrelated?

usernomdeguerre

>Carrefour (CARR.PA), opens new tab said 80 of its supermarkets had been hit but that the vast majority of its 6,000 stores had not been affected. It would be useful to know the scale, as it sounds very similar to an attack on US Military Commisary's a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 Usually i'd feel like this was a large-scale operation but there's no denying that AI tools can copy/parrot/clone this type of work near instantaneously, so who knows.