Throughout history, food supplies have been a weapon of war: deny an enemy access to food and you weaken resistance. It’s called a siege. During the Hundred Years’ War, for example, the English and French repeatedly fought to disrupt supply routes and besieged fortified settlements in an effort to starve out their opponents. Centuries later, though, you don’t necessarily need to surround a European hub or blockade its roads. Use the internet to tinker with the configuration settings on supermarket refrigeration systems and you can achieve something remarkably similar: food waste, supply-chain disruption and huge financial losses. Zoe Kleinman, technology and AI editor at the BBC, has been speaking with Chris Smith…Zoe – Do you know what? I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time in my life talking about fridges and freezers as I have in the last few days. Essentially what’s happened is a number of supermarket fridge freezers in various countries across Europe seem to spontaneously defrost and in some cases heat up to really high temperatures which resulted of course in millions of euros worth of food being destroyed. Now I say spontaneously, it was a hack. Somebody or something has hacked into some of these devices. It’s the second wave of it actually because it happened a few weeks ago in France and now it’s happened again but we don’t know whether these two incidents are connected. I mean they may well be but we don’t know that for sure yet.Chris – Is there a single fridge type manufacturer model that’s doing this? Or are a range of models being affected?Zoe – The main manufacturer is called Danfoss. It’s a brand from Denmark. There aren’t actually too many of them in the UK which is good news for the UK but there were some other brands caught up in it as well but the thing is because these particular fridges are internet connected it means that they can be controlled and maintained remotely. You don’t have to go into the store to manually twiddle knobs if you need to do something with them but what it also has meant is anything that’s connected to the internet therefore needs the same sort of security protection as you’d put on the phone or a laptop and that means keeping up with your software updates, changing the password from the factory setting that you get when it’s in the box and it looks like what’s happened here is that those protocols have not been followed and the fridges that have been affected were not the ones that had been kept up to date.Chris – These fridges are an example of the internet of things movement that’s been sort of emerging over the last 15 years where everyday more mundane devices have connectivity on the internet and they can do what you’ve outlined. They can allow remote access, remote control, remote monitoring. So are the fridges then the tip of the iceberg if you excuse the pun? Are we likely to see other appliances because fridges are not alone in being online are they? Are we going to see other appliances perhaps falling victim to this in the days, weeks, months ahead?Zoe – You’re right you know there’s been a bit of a frenzy hasn’t there in the last few years of connecting everything to the internet and I’m sure that most people in their home and on their person will have various devices that are internet enabled and because so many things are. Is it going to spread? Well it’s impossible for me to say. I mean I haven’t got a crystal ball but anything that’s on the internet is potentially vulnerable and needs to have that security maintenance and why is it that password 123 is still the most commonly used password despite years and years and years of you know cyber security experts telling us that it shouldn’t be? Do you do your software updates? Do you have a device that’s quite old and really at the end of its life it isn’t getting the updates anymore because the operating system that it’s running on is too old to receive them. That’s also a sign that it is not going to be as protected as it could be and I suppose the other thing to consider is what’s the point? You know why would a hacker do this and the answer to that is there’s usually two reasons. One is money and the other is disruption. Me hacking into your toaster Chris is going to disrupt your morning breakfast routine. It’s not really going to do much else is it? There’s not really much of an incentive for me to do that. If I was a criminal maybe I would hack your toaster and mean that you know it only burns the toast and then send you a message and say send me loads of money and I’ll you know I’ll stop your toaster from burning your toast but that hasn’t happened in the case of the fridges. Nobody’s been in touch. Nobody’s asked for any money or said you know we’ll stop the fridges from doing this because they’ve already done it and the other option is would I do it if I’m a hostile country and I just want to cause disruption and chaos. I want to mess up the supermarket shopping experience you know especially when people are stockpiling because that’s what we’ve been told to do. I want to cause havoc. I want to distract people from maybe broader issues that are going on. You know that’s the sort of hack that’s like it’s just addictive isn’t it? And the third option of course is just kids messing about. They found that these things are vulnerable and thought hey what happens if we do this? That’s option number three. So I think when you’re thinking about you know what might be next you have to think about well what is the incentive and if it ticks any of those three boxes then yeah potentially you need to keep an eye on it.Chris – It could be dangerous though because some of these fridges they can for reasons and purposes of defrosting can transiently blast air at 150 degrees plus celsius into the freezer compartment. So if you just lock that on you can start a fire like this can you? So this could be used as a sort of a warfare measure because you could actually start causing conflagrations around a target country if you’re a hostile state via this sort of mechanism.Zoe – Yeah you’re right and there have been some incidents these fridges getting extremely hot and I think maybe there have been a couple of fires as a result as well. So yes you’re right you know the fridge as a weapon is perhaps something that we haven’t considered before but you know everything that’s coming out from the cyber security industry and that includes the National Cyber Security Centre here in the UK suggests that this is this was not a sophisticated attack. This was really quite easy for whoever it was that did it and they literally just found the vulnerability that was out there and there was a fix for, identified the fridges and freezers that hadn’t had that fix and hit them. So you know we’re not talking about some new sophisticated wave of AI enabled cybercrime we’re talking about old-fashioned low-hanging fruit which is badly maintained machines and poor passwords.Chris – People have been saying this for a long time now haven’t they? We’ve bought many of these devices they were very convenient, very easy to configure and very compatible with everyone’s home networks and things because they were so stuffed full of security flaws. We filled our homes with them, cameras, I mean I even spoke to one person recently who has this automatic plant watering system which is online.He can water his pot plants when he goes on holiday from his phone. The problem is that got hacked and someone flooded a room with it you know. So we’ve got houses stuffed with this sort of tech therefore is this a really canary in the coal mine these fridges and freezers because they’re highlighting the fact that we are very vulnerable and already we’ve got a state we’re going to struggle to reverse from because unless we rip out all this stuff it’s old technology as you say with with old security and very very vulnerable.Zoe – I think there’s nothing wrong with doing a bit of cyber house cleaning if you like and you know taking stock of everything you’ve got online having a look at it have you ever changed the passwords on any of this stuff if you haven’t do it you know is there an app lurking that says you’ve got 363 software updates if there is you know grin and bear it and do it. One of my favourite phrases that I hear a lot from cyber security folk is this phrase and convenience is the enemy of security and it’s so true isn’t it you start out with good intentions but when it comes to it you know you just you’re fed up with just never being able to remember a password so you just use the one that you know and you’re fed up with having to stop everything while an update happens so you just don’t do it and you are sort of sleepwalking if you like in into and thinking oh it just won’t happen to me you know what’s the point as I was saying like why would anyone attack me but there is usually a reason for someone to to do something if they’re if they’re so intended and if you if you kind of leave the door open for them you are making it pretty easy for them.
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