Vol. II, No. 136 From Our Region to Yours
Tech

Hackers Turn Europe's Smart Supermarket Freezers Into Smart Supermarket Ovens

Overnight attackers remotely switched refrigeration units at supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland and beyond into defrost mode, sending freezers to about 122 degrees. Our tech reporter calls it a stress test for the connected cold chain, then has a quick call.

By 2 min read

A long row of glass-door supermarket freezers stocked with frozen meals, nuggets and onion rings, lit from inside, under a large painted sign reading TIEFKÜHLPRODUKTE, with a REWE logo on a poster of ice cream at the left.
Freezers at a supermarket in Frankfurt, which were not among those hit and, as of this writing, are still cold. Photo: Alexis Jazz / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

SOMEWHERE WITH GOOD WI-FI — I want to open with a win, because there is always a win. For a few hours early Monday, Europe’s supermarket freezers achieved something the industry has been chasing for years: real-time, remote, fully automated temperature management. It just went the other direction.

Here is what happened. Around 2 a.m. local time, someone got remote access to refrigeration systems at supermarkets across several countries and switched the units’ evaporators into defrost mode, according to Reuters and NBC News. Freezers climbed to about 50 degrees Celsius, or roughly 122 degrees Fahrenheit. That is not a freezer. That is a sauna with a price tag on it.

The list of affected chains reads like a European grocery fantasy league. In Belgium, Delhaize, Carrefour and Colruyt’s Spar shops were hit, Carrefour in 15 of its more than 700 stores. In Sweden it was ICA and Coop. In Ireland, Musgrave said 13 SuperValu stores were affected. One supermarket chain in Estonia also reported a problem. That is what we call multi-market traction.

The head of Sabcobel, the Belgian refrigeration company that runs Delhaize’s cooling systems, told the Belga news agency it was a cyberattack, carried out by remotely flipping the units into defrost. His team spent the night disconnecting them. Nobody has claimed responsibility. Nobody was hurt. A great deal of food was thrown out, which in my industry we would call an aggressive inventory reset.

It is also not the first time. In October, attackers did something similar to cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets in France, NBC News reported. Two incidents is a trend. A trend is a market. I have been saying this about fridges since my last pitch deck.

Let me jump on a quick call with my co-founder. He has been building a product for exactly this use case.

Okay, I am back. The product is called ColdCall. It is a second smart device that monitors your first smart device and sends you a push notification if it starts cooking. If ColdCall itself gets hacked, a third device watches it. “It is turtles all the way down, except the turtles are subscriptions,” my co-founder said. He considers this the moat.

People keep asking why a freezer needs to be on the internet at all. I think that misses the innovation here. A connected freezer can be monitored from anywhere, adjusted from anywhere and optimized from anywhere. By anyone, it turns out. That last part is not in the brochure, but every revolutionary platform has a few edge cases.

The industry response is already very next-gen. There are dashboards. There are alerts. Stores put up out-of-service notices, and Musgrave pulled chilled and frozen products from sale. A store manager in Stockholm told Reuters that all of her store’s freezers reached 50 degrees, which is the kind of uptime nobody wants to report.

So yes, this is a game-changing moment for the connected cold chain. The freezers were smart. The dashboards were smart. The remote access was very smart. The only thing in the building that would have stayed cold through all of it, now that I type it out, is a freezer that was never plugged into anything but the wall.

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