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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Wait, I recall reading the threads about someone speculating there was a hack. Some people suggested it could just be that a large percentage of refrigeration units received a software update at the same time which resembled a hack.

Is there a definitive story that someone actually did hack these units on a grand scale?

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There have been (at least) two separate waves to this now, which makes the "innocent broken update" speculation much less likely?

Unless they push updates in waves, which is what most big rollouts do.

That's a known playbook. Stir up shit, then create an uplausible denial which will take experts some time to debunk. Once it's figured out the story was bs, put out another three. By the week end there is 10 narratives and nobody except the field experts is sure that it's the usual suspects doing the usual things, but nobody listens to those

Examples of this happening in the past?

I believe the most documented example is mh17

This type of attack lasted few days in different countries, quite hard to believe the fridge manufacturer could keep pushing these updates after all the news around.

Fwiw, the first thread I recall was a speculative blog post about commissary freezers for the US military: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506

That's the first of four incidents I've seen in the news recently. As far as I know it's the one that could have been some other kind of correlated failure (bad update, calendar bug, whatever). We don't know much about it.

After that were two separate supermarket events, which I think were both linked to the known Danfoss vulnerability (CVE-2025-41450); and most recently a blood bank event.

Now, as of November 2026, it is confirmed as a hack.

Confirmed exploits, many manufacturers, experts, …

My view is that some companies installing this have not implemented any defense in depth and cut corners all around. Installing a firewall with a simple vpn service would probably have prevented lots of pain (unfrosting). In general we also see almost every security expert working at banks or other high paying companies and not for supermarkets. My feeling is that this 'niche' is probably interesting to spend some 'tokens' and time on.

> Is there a definitive story that someone actually did hack these units on a grand scale?

Given the scope here (see map at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_French_supermarket_refrig...), it'd either be individual hackers getting inspired from their neighbor hackers, or one actor targeting European countries.

Although seemingly the hack wasn't so sophisticated, maybe it's truly just some kids fucking around with what they see being open, and maybe just want to target European countries for the "lulz" or whatever, who knows.

It's most certainly a form or hybrid warfare. While being very easy to perform, it's still quite effective. Empty supermarkets and supply chains being disturbed. Hopefully this is a wakeup call for the industry.

> Hopefully this is a wakeup call for the industry.

Would be nice but none of the other <waves at cybersecurity for the last decade> events has been.

It seems like something horrific is going to have to happen before this is taken as seriously by government and private orgs as it should have been, that seems to be how it works with other stuff historically.

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