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Comment by mosesman | Hacker News Reader

There was a cyberattack in France with 350-400 supermarkets having its fridges heated to 50C, instantly defrosting and spoiling food.

When your fridges hit 50C, that’s not a bug... thats a hotfix

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Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055304 - Oct 2026 (971 comments)

Meanwhile, inside your odd sandboxed environment there's an agent changing a folder name to "zz_thermostat-disabled_answerkey_not_in_carrefour"

They didn't actually hit 50C, right? I read it as setting the thermostat to 50C, which basically would just turn off the cooling compressor entirely - not heat the fridge.

I read somewhere else that they activated a quick defrost function and as those were industrial fridge, it seems they can heat to 50C

Wouldn't surprise me if they could go all the way to 200C as part of self-cleaning/self-sterilizing cycle.

Well, if there's water (or ice/frost) inside, you probably don't want to go above 100C. You'd turn it into a boiler, and pressure-test the door seals.

I don't know about these particular fridges that got hacked, but most supermarket fridges I've seen around the world either have no doors, or if they do, their doors have wide gaps and no seals (they'd only make it harder for the shoppers to shop, and given the usual foot traffic, they'd wear out completely after a week).

Exceptions I've seen: some top-opened supermarket freezers (particularly with hinged, heavy doors), and most fridges in small shops. I've seen a few that could turn into pressure bombs this way, but I very much doubt these had any networking/remote control capabilities.

So far as I can tell, the thermostat was set to 150 C, and it actually reached 50 C.

Though given how easy it is to make the error, "150" may have been a fat-finger typo for "50".

Are we aware if these attacks are actually connected?

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Largest supermarket in The Netherlands was hacked yesterday: https://nltimes.nl/2026/10/13/albert-heijn-outage-likely-cyb...

Empty shelves, no online ordering.

The enemy of supermarkets?

The enemy of the (perceived) enemy's economy. There is a war in Europe, and the EU and the USA are mostly involved economically. Causing economic damage to the financiers of the enemy is a standard Cold War pattern. Oil-embargo warfare is a double-edged sword: while it hits the EU hard, it also causes pain for Russia. This is most likely one in a series of low-hanging-fruit attacks intended to cause economic damage to Ukraine's financiers.

Russia probably. There is a war, you know.

badum-tsch

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