Reported by The Guardian
Cybersecurity experts say incidents had minimal effect but may represent the ‘foothills’ of a wider threat
Meat suppliers in the UK have been hit by cyber-attacks after hackers raised the temperatures of supermarket freezers across Europe.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it was working with the affected companies but that the national impact was minimal.
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Speaking at the launch of the NCSC annual review on Tuesday , the centre’s director of operations, Paul Chichester, said: “We’re aware of those incidents in the UK, and obviously we’re working with the affected organisations. We’ll keep monitoring that.
Cybersecurity experts meanwhile reported that attacks on “dummy” fridge controls – deliberately placed online to lure would-be hackers – displayed characteristics similar to previous malicious operations linked to Russia.
Retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported problems with their refrigeration systems on Monday – with some rising to as high as 50C (122F) – and several companies confirmed they had been hacked. It follows similar incidents in France last month . It has emerged that the cyber-attack on French supermarket fridges involved legacy technology connected to internet with default passwords.
Chichester said the NCSC, part of the GCHQ spy agency, was working with organisations to identify similar loopholes in their technology and close them before hackers exploit them.
He said the NCSC was not able to comment on who might have carried out the attacks, but that they were not AI-enabled and had used vulnerabilities that had been “out there for a long period of time”.
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The NCSC’s chief executive, Richard Horne, said the fridge attacks represented the “foothills” of an enlarged cyberthreat that companies and the public face as AI systems highlight flaws in IT networks that owners were not aware of or neglected to patch.
“There are so many vulnerabilities out there that … you could say are waiting to be exploited,” he said.
The agency’s chief technology officer, Ollie Whitehouse, said everyday domestic devices connected…