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The story
On the night of October 11 into October 12, France saw a cyberattack targeting the refrigeration and freezer systems of hundreds of supermarkets. The equipment’s temperature rose to as high as 50°C, leading to the mass disposal of fresh and frozen food. French authorities have opened an investigation. On 5ch, many posters expressed shock that supermarket refrigeration units are even connected to the internet in the first place, with opinions split between the labor-saving benefits of remote monitoring and the security risks it creates. There was also no shortage of speculation about the attackers’ motive — financial extortion versus a thrill-seeking prank — though nothing has been confirmed.
Cyberattack Hits Refrigeration Systems at Hundreds of French Supermarkets, Temperatures Spike to 50°C, Causing Mass Food Disposal – ITmedia NEWS
October 13, 2026, 10:20 AM [ITmedia]
A large-scale cyberattack targeting refrigeration and freezer equipment hit French supermarkets on the night of October 11 into October 12 local time. According to reports, the equipment’s temperature rose as high as 50°C, resulting in the mass disposal of fresh and frozen food. Hundreds of stores were affected, and French authorities have launched an investigation.
Source: itmedia.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Wait, you can actually crank it up to 50°C? lol
Q: What's 50°F in Celsius?
A: 10°C
Apparently it's the defrost heater used for maintenance.
Re: #70
France uses Celsius.
Usually there's a monitoring function, but changing the settings remotely shouldn't normally be possible.
A TV Tokyo program said Panasonic (through Sanyo Electric, which it acquired) runs the same kind of business.
If they'd stuck to just cameras, this wouldn't have happened.
Even if you regulate it, criminal states and organizations will just ignore the rules and keep developing it — we'd only end up unable to keep up.
You can't regulate human desire that easily.
The law is way too soft.
At least make the penalty as harsh as arson — they're basically modern-day arsonists.
This is flat-out terrorism, so yeah, death penalty.
Even regular home appliances let you check on them remotely these days.
Webcams are probably getting hacked left and right too.
Sounds like vending machines are going to start dumping out products on their own next.
I don't get people who put cheap webcams in their own homes.
In the Middle East, pagers got swapped out for bombs, remember.
The fact that it's not even meant as irony says it all.
And it's just like Japan to be the one trying to put a stop to that too. Over in the West they legalized electric scooters, and now things are clearly heading toward tightening up on them — yet somehow Japan goes and legalizes them only now, just in time to rack up a wave of accidents. So very Japan.
It's a shakedown. 'Pay up if you don't want this happening to you.'
If AI can pull this off, it's probably just trolls doing it for kicks — kind of like that Korean 'F5 attack' thing from about 15 years ago (a crude DDoS where people mass-refresh a page).
Don't connect it just because it's convenient.
Why only look at the downside lol. Ban remote control and we're back in the Showa era lol
But combine AI with always-online and security turns into Swiss cheese, so yeah, we really are heading back to the Showa era.
It's no joke — more industries than you'd think will probably end up retreating. AI's progress is never going to stop, so in the end there are only two options: humanity gives up the internet to keep AI from being weaponized, or a lot of industries pull out of the internet to keep it running safely. And we'll be forced to make that choice sooner than you'd think.
Washer-dryers too.
Seems like remote monitoring is used to cut down on labor — apparently nobody logs temperatures by hand anymore.
There are things you can hand over to automation and things you can't.
Self-driving is fine as long as it's standalone, but cars whose OS can be updated over a network are done for — terrorists will exploit that.
When it comes to cars, you can't ignore the fact that human driving is dangerous too.
It's not like the settings need changing that often.
I'm not totally sure either, but once you're talking large-scale automated control, doesn't a PC end up involved on top of the machine itself?
Apparently the manufacturer remotely schedules the defrost cycle for outside store hours, and runs it longer when there's more frost buildup.
Home fridges have that too — the defrost function. You just reverse the heat exchanger's cycle.
Though for an actual hot-drink function, you'd need a heater running alongside it too.
More like a switch between 'cheeeap~' and 'Mr. President~' (a nod to the shouty bargain-store commercial catchphrases).
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
By way of background, commercial refrigeration and freezer units at supermarkets and similar businesses have increasingly been connected to networks in recent years, letting manufacturers remotely adjust defrost timing and temperature settings. This cuts down on manual, handwritten temperature logging, but as posters in the thread pointed out, a setup that allows not just monitoring but remote configuration changes also becomes a weak point that can magnify the damage from a cyberattack. Authorities have not disclosed who carried out this attack or their motive, so the theories floated in the thread — financial extortion, a thrill-seeking prank, state involvement — remain unconfirmed speculation. Note that the back-and-forth over Fahrenheit versus Celsius in some posts was a joke premised on the article’s ’50 degrees’ being Celsius, not an actual error in interpreting the figure.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Cyberattack Hits Refrigeration Systems at Hundreds of French Supermarkets, Temperatures Spike to 50°C, Causing Mass Food Disposal.”
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