Supermarket freezer cyberattack 'not sophisticated,' Prof. Kevin Curran explains

Stefan Grobe discusses the recent failures of freezers in European retail and healthcare sectors with Kevin Curran, a Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Ulster. Curran attributes the primary cause to a change during the COVID era, where technicians needed to access and service fridges while off-site. However, the controllers that enabled this off-site access have often gone without updates for roughly a decade.

Recognized flaws have allowed malicious actors to log in to these systems without authentication for years. Curran asserts that companies have not learned from these vulnerabilities, as evidenced by the supermarket cases where default passwords remain unchanged, and VPNs are not utilized. He describes the attacks as not sophisticated, but acknowledges a dramatic rise in cyberattacks in the past week, with newly discovered exploits reaching 17,060 in the last month, compared to an average of 30 to 40 per month a decade ago.

Several retail chains have faced significant cyberattack-related freezer failures, resulting in multi-million euro losses in frozen and refrigerated goods. Additionally, blood banks in France recently experienced a similar cyberattack, which was detected and resolved before any blood products were compromised.