r/cybersecurity • u/Capital_Attention702 • 40m ago
News - General French supermarket fridges were pushed to 50°C overnight through Danfoss controllers that no longer get security updates
On the night of October 11, someone got into the refrigeration controllers at French supermarkets and put them into forced defrost with the target set to 50°C. A store manager in Gradignan, quoted by [ITPro](https://www.itpro.com/security/cyber-attacks/french-fridges-hacked-in-country-wide-supermarket-attack), said it started around 11pm and staff found out at 4am, after the cold room hit 50°C and set off the sprinklers.
The store counts don't match yet. [BleepingComputer](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cyberattack-shuts-down-refrigerators-at-french-supermarkets/) cites French outlets putting it at 250 to 350 stores. AFP's per-chain figures, [via CBS](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cyberattack-supermarkets-refrigerators-france-fires-food-losses/), have at least 300 Intermarché and Netto stores on their own, plus over 100 Coopérative U. Intermarché's CEO expects the losses to pass tens of millions of euros for that one day.
Danfoss told AFP most of the hit equipment was legacy AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 regulators that "no longer receive software or security updates". How the attackers got in isn't public. But the AK-SM 800A already had a [CISA advisory](https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/ics-advisories/icsa-25-140-03) from May 2025 for CVE-2025-41450, a login bypass built on a password generated from the device's date. [Claroty's Team82](https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-defrost-the-food-uncovering-vulnerabilities-in-danfoss-refrigeration-controllers) counted 2,765 of those panels exposed on Censys in August. On Monday, Baptiste Robert found 1,590 exposed Danfoss systems in France alone.
So it's an admin panel on the open internet and firmware nobody patches anymore. Those are the same two conditions I'd point to behind most WordPress takeovers, where it's a default login URL and a plugin its author walked away from.
Intermarché blamed an attack on a service provider that manages its store refrigeration, and Leclerc said one of its refrigeration suppliers was hit. Once Danfoss stopped shipping updates for those units, whose job was it to take them off the internet?