AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In the middle of the night, another wave of suspected cyberattacks targeted European supermarkets and refrigerators in countries like Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands. All of this comes after a large-scale cyberattack on hundreds of French supermarkets last month. Meanwhile, NPR has been investigating what appears to be a pattern of similar attacks going back as far as the spring, including at U.S. military bases and in Israel. For more, we're joined now by NPR cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin. Hi, Jenna.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: Hey there.
CHANG: Hey. So what do we know about these latest attacks?
MCLAUGHLIN: Not a lot yet, but we do know stores in multiple countries, like you mentioned, from Sweden to Belgium, they had refrigerators heating up to over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the night...
CHANG: Wow.
MCLAUGHLIN: ...Causing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of food to spoil.
CHANG: Yeah.
MCLAUGHLIN: That might sound like science fiction, but tons of things, even in our homes, these days are connected to the internet. That's baby cameras, fridges, everything.
CHANG: Yeah.
MCLAUGHLIN: That's on an even bigger scale for major companies, and those systems are a lot more complicated. What I can tell you is that the digital devices that help store managers monitor and control these machines from afar, they're vulnerable to hacking, and that's what we're seeing here.
CHANG: Clearly. So tell me more about that. Like, when did this all start?
MCLAUGHLIN: So a lot of people, I think, first heard about this in October when over 400 French supermarkets experienced a similar hack. But actually, this trend goes back even further. Let me take you back to Israel in the spring. I spoke to Omri Segev Moyal, the CEO and co-founder of an Israeli cyberincident response firm called Profero, about an attack on a major food chain in May. I talked to him while he was driving, and I was sort of furiously typing to take notes during the conversation. But I just want you to hear this exchange we had about the moment engineers found their fridge compressors completely destroyed by hackers.
So eliminated as in damaged, destroyed, co-opted? What do you mean?
OMRI SEGEV MOYAL: Blown up.
MCLAUGHLIN: Blown up?
MOYAL: Blown up.
MCLAUGHLIN: Wow.
MOYAL: They - I mean, don't look at it like C-4 exploding, but, you know, the compressors pretty much blown up. They got overused, and there was smoke.
CHANG: Whoa.
MCLAUGHLIN: That wasn't all. Yeah, they found malware designed to wipe data on their computers. And the hackers had taken over the printers at the office, and they were spitting out a bunch of scary threats and propaganda.
CHANG: My God. Do we know more about who was behind that attack?
MCLAUGHLIN: In this case, we do. Moyal is pretty confident that it was an Iranian hacking group that the U.S. and Israeli officials have linked to the Iranian military. They pretty much claimed it. They printed out their logo at the company, and later they released a propaganda video about the hack. Things were then quiet until August when fridges at several U.S. military bases experienced outages as well. The Pentagon won't officially say that that's cyber-related, but all of my sources think that it is.
And then, you know, all this happened in Europe more recently. We have a lot less detail about what happened after this incident in Israel. We don't know if these incidents are connected. But clearly, hackers are recognizing that these systems are vulnerable to attack.
CHANG: Yeah. But I mean, Jenna, where does all of this leave us? Like, will we just be seeing more and more of this kind of activity, refrigerators getting super hot?
MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, I mean, I think if nothing changes, we probably will. I talked to one expert, Amir Preminger from Clarity, which is a cybersecurity firm that first published research way back in August on vulnerabilities in refrigeration controllers - the ones that happened to be used by the French supermarkets that got hacked and, according to some public contracts that I unearthed, the same ones that U.S. military defense commissaries are using.
He used a tool called Shodan while we were on the phone. It's basically Google for stuff that's connected to the internet. And he saw a bunch of refrigeration systems that were still openly exposed to the internet after the French attacks. He told me that everything's connected to the internet these days. These systems are really hard to secure, in part because they're really old and because updating them would require shutting them down. No one wants to do that if you're dealing with power and hospitals.
CHANG: Right.
MCLAUGHLIN: Plus, many companies just haven't prioritized it. There are some things that could make it more secure, like taking it off the internet for one, tightly controlling access, segmenting the network, using backups, etc., but hackers are just getting better at targeting these systems, especially now that they have AI to help them.
CHANG: Indeed.
MCLAUGHLIN: There's a lot more to learn and a lot more to report on in the coming days.
CHANG: That is NPR's Jenna McLaughlin. Thank you, Jenna.
MCLAUGHLIN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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