r/extremelyinfuriating • u/Legitimate_Resort717 • 1d ago
News A cyberattack in France forced multiple grocery stores to discard large amounts of temperature-sensitive product after hackers turned the heat up on food refrigerators in hundreds of stores across at least five chain brands.
I don’t buy any appliances that need an internet connection.
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u/NuclearHateLizard 1d ago
Imagine if the people with the ability to do shit like this actually attacked the people responsible for the problems they're rebelling against?
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u/SycoJack 21h ago
Imagine if the people with the ability to do shit like this
You mean Russia? Pretty sure this is gonna end up being another Russian attack.
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u/PCbuilderFR 17h ago
It's not Russia just some random 12 yo on discord... All of the fridges were open on the internet with no authentication literally anybody can do it...
If it were a state actor they would have put it at 4-5 degrés instead of 50, and modified what the fridge displays, this way tens of thousands of people would have died from bacteria in their meat before the stores realised what had happened...
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u/BunsinHoneyDew 1d ago
If only there were employees near the coolers all the time that can regularly check temperatures. Then we wouldn't need this totally neccesary internet connectivity.
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u/Kasaikemono 1d ago
How do you check temperatures during closing times?
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u/BunsinHoneyDew 1d ago
You would have to have a temp logger on the fridge.
I use them all the time they just record temps and you can set the interval.
They aren't on the internet.
Then if it dropped below food safe levels when the store was closed you would have to dump the food.
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u/Its6pri1 23h ago
That's what happened, it was during the night, so that's why they had to dump a lot of food actually.
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u/The_Troyminator 23h ago
And if the power went out for several hours and came back on before you opened, you’d never know.
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u/SycoJack 21h ago
Yeah you would. The logger can be battery powered, it can also just record the interruption.
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u/wesleysmalls 1d ago
I doubt you have tens of fridges across thousands of stores across a whole country.
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u/BunsinHoneyDew 1d ago
Yes but there are employees at every location? So what is your point?
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u/doublemp 1d ago
They aren't on site overnight when this happened.
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u/BunsinHoneyDew 1d ago
And if they weren't on the internet it never would have happened.
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u/wesleysmalls 16h ago
Actually it would have happened much more frequently as you cannot catch failures in real time.
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u/Xalipu 15h ago
You can with a data logger with a squawker on it, either using the internet(but like, secure the frigging thing) or cellular if the carrier provides that functionality.
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u/wesleysmalls 10h ago
Again, much easier to centralize this than to let every single store figure it out.
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u/wesleysmalls 1d ago
That it’s logical to centralize a menial task that is the exact same in every fridge in every store of that chain that you would preferably do when the store is closed
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u/Wanderer-clueless963 1d ago
What a waste! So many people struggle just to pay for their food… if it had ended in them getting free food I would have understood but this?
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u/No-Mathematician8692 19h ago
Oho hahaha regular outlets throw away TONS of food everyday. Some even spray them so those inconvenient homeless people can't live off it.
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u/Wanderer-clueless963 17h ago
I knew they did that in the States routinely, but in France?
I am so disgusted! 😡
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u/Kasaikemono 1d ago
I see this posted so often, and every time with the same braindead "hurr, smart appliances dumb" take.
For your home? Sure, that's fair. I wouldn't buy a smart fridge either. But consumer electronics is wildly different from business electronics.
As a grocer, you need to guarantee that the fridge is always cold enough. Reading and documenting the data for every single fridge by hand takes time and manpower. Why would you do that if you could just have them send the data automatically to a server?
Next, maintenance. What do you do if a fridge fails at night? You need a service technician ASAP. Not "in the morning" or "the next time we open and someone bothers to check the temps", now. Which can be taken care of automatically.
Yes, the risk of hacking is real, as we can currently see, but I'd wager that they still saved more money by just throwing the food away and buying new stuff, compared to the actual running costs of a dumb fridge.
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u/shapeshade 1d ago
Seems like you could have temperature logs uploaded to a server without allowing the fridge's temperature to be controlled via the internet.
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u/No-Mathematician8692 19h ago
Unfortunately the techs and engineers needed 24/7 can only be accessed via the net.
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u/justmedealwithitxD 1d ago
Crazy they did this before "smart tech" just fine,
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u/The_Troyminator 23h ago
No they didn’t do it just fine. Fridges would fail overnight and they’d have to throw everything out. Or they’d fail, nobody would notice, and people would get food poisoning. Smart commercial refrigerators have saved a ton of food and improved food safety.
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u/mrfoxesite-2377 17h ago
I would waste money than waste food when world hunger is a thing.
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u/Kasaikemono 14h ago
Yeah, you.
You don't have to act economically. A store has to.
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u/mrfoxesite-2377 14h ago
I'm talking about if I was the store.
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u/Kasaikemono 13h ago
It doesn't work like that, though. You can't just decide "I wanna waste money", you are obliged by law to act financially responsible.
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u/CharAznableLoNZ 1d ago
Sounds like the consequence of using an internet connected fridge. A fridge does not require a single transistor to function. Although a self defrost feature is nice, that can be done with simple timer.
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u/LongjumpingSurvey588 18h ago
This, the protests, a market burned to the ground a couple nights ago.. shit’s crazy in France right now.
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u/Another_Slut_Dragon 14h ago
Ai is hacking all the things now, internet security is dead.
It's time to figure out how to run your company machinery air gapped and offline. If you need remote monitoring, that can be a separate, MONITOR ONLY system with zero remote controls and no ability to connect to the control system.
There are countless cases like this but most don't make the news.
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u/the_duck17 13h ago
Happened in China too but instead it was aquarium controls.
Hackers found out they could just control these things and started raising temps and killing fish that way too.
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u/Averagebass 1d ago
That's just anarchy, doesn't help any causes and wastes something people actually could benefit from. At least knock out the power to a bank or something.
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u/Naerym 1d ago
Anarchy is something completely different.
In a political sense, it means:
"Anarchy does not aim for disorder, but rather a horizontal order self-managed through voluntary agreement, solidarity, and direct democracy."
And in the pejorative sense:
"A state of general confusion, unrest, disorder, or chaos caused by an absence of authority, a power vacuum, or a failure to observe the law."
Incidentally, anarchy is often confused with anomie.
In this specific case, it is an act of food vandalism; consequently, it is entirely different from a chaotic situation or a vision for society.
That is precisely what makes the situation even more infuriating: there is not even a political or societal goal or a specific demand that could be judged as either legitimate or illegitimate.
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