Supermarket freezer cyberattack 'not sophisticated,' Prof. Kevin Curran explains

A new warning about Europe's vulnerability to cyber-attacks. From supermarket refrigeration systems across the continent to blood bank facilities in France, hackers are increasingly targeting the digital systems that keep our societies running and potentially putting lives at risk. Is this just cybercrime, or are we witnessing a new front in hybrid warfare against Europe? Joining me now is Professor Kevin Caron, cybersecurity expert at Ulster University in the UK. Good morning to you. So what exactly are hackers doing? How can someone sitting behind a computer remotely take control of a supermarket's refrigerators or blood bank's cooling systems? Yes, this operational technology is becoming more common, especially in the wake of COVID, where a lot of technicians were not able to travel to remote sites. Therefore, it seemed to be easier to install remote monitoring systems as well, which can be logged into remotely, you're able to check the temperature, able to control the temperature. And of course, these fridges again need evaporation circuits turned on daily, actually, to run so that the fridge It doesn't become ice stuff, of course. Now, you know, on paper, it's a good idea, of course. But the fact is, these were very weak. The controllers that are used to be able to log into from anywhere in the world, Thank that one of them, for instance, doesn't have any updates for basically 10 years. The other one for five years. The flaws have been known for a number of years. you The way that you can log in remotely without even needing to authenticate. very And yet, of course, a few last month in France, again, fridges were attacked. And then this week, fridges were attacked again. much. So lessons were not learned the first time. On this note, so supermarket refrigerators are hardly considered critical infrastructure, yet their failure can cause millions of euros in losses. Have companies underestimated the cybersecurity risks of everyday technology? Unfortunately, it seems not that people have to consider and companies, of course, you know, does anything that can be connected to the Internet, should it be in cases like this best practice in cybersecurity was not handled quite often the default passwords. We're never changed again. They didn't use any kind of what we call a VPN for good practice to access these units as well. So, in fact, there are so many things wrong and it is not a sophisticated attack. In this case, AI was not used. But it's worth noting in the last week, we have seen a dramatic rise in cyber attacks as we speak. Thank Unprecedented, actually. We have this common database, which is shared around the world by all the technology companies. you Whenever an exploit is found, like in this case, you this would have been recorded many years ago, it goes into a database. very Ten years ago, this database, the average number of per month of exploits that were found was about 30 to 40. much. Last month, this common vulnerable exploitation database added a new 17,060 attacks.