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The story
Cooling equipment used to store donated blood in France was hacked, with attackers tampering with the temperature settings. According to local media, cooling systems at three facilities nationwide malfunctioned on the 2nd of this month, briefly raising storage temperatures from -30°C to 110°C. On 5ch, the thread ranged from technical questions — why are medical devices managed over a network at all, and why do freezer units even have a heating function — to speculation about lost rare blood types and the attackers’ motives.
It has emerged that an organization managing donated blood in France had its cooling equipment hacked, with the set temperature drastically raised.
According to local media, on the 2nd of this month, the cooling systems at three facilities nationwide malfunctioned, and the storage temperature was briefly set from -30°C to “110°C.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Because having to go on-site to operate it every single time is a pain.
Bringing a deep-freeze tank back up to room temperature is a real hassle without one.
Isn't that for defrosting?
I literally just donated blood the month before last.
Guess I'll go do a component or 400ml donation again at the end of this month too.
That kind of workaround is fine for regular people, but a company doing the same thing just loses the competition.
Supermarkets in various countries had their temperature settings messed with and lost all their food too.
I've already blown through this month's welfare payment and savings, no way I can afford to stockpile anything.
Probably training an attack AI.
500°C is way too much, man…
They're probably a "person with nothing to lose" (muteki no hito – slang for someone with nothing left to risk) – they're not thinking that far ahead.
They're probably attacking from abroad, so they wouldn't care if another country's healthcare system collapses.
Re: #19
Why are you assuming it's a human hacker behind this and not an AI?
Are they doing this with some kind of "let the whole world burn" mentality?
Then again, it's only 3 years until 2029 (the year the series is set in), so I guess that actually tracks.
If we ever get cyberbrains, we're going to be hacked constantly.
You shouldn't do this on humanitarian grounds, period.
Hospitals are the number one target for ransomware attacks.
Do they need anything besides a cooling function?
Defrost heaters themselves exist in Japan too.
Whether they're network-connected for integrated remote management is a separate question though.
"Being able to control the temperature from your phone would be convenient" -> if it connects to your phone, it connects from anywhere in the world. That's all this is.
Huh?
By that logic they should make knives and guns unusable for crime too.
Common blood types move fast enough that they just get used up quickly and can be kept refrigerated instead.
There are all sorts of blood types after all.
If any rare ones were in that storage, whoever did this is basically a confirmed killer.
>Shodan is a search engine that lets you find devices connected to the internet.
While search engines like Google specialize in finding websites, Shodan is the device equivalent.
"Devices" here covers everything from servers and network equipment to factory IoT devices, security cameras, and even personal computers.
The impact of vulnerability risks keeps growing, making vulnerability assessments essential for protecting corporate systems.
Among the many methods, tools, and services used for vulnerability assessment, this column introduces the features of the device-search engine "Shodan" and some examples of how it's used in vulnerability research.
Couldn't this be abused if someone wanted to?
Background and Key Points of This Story
This incident is one example of cyberattacks reaching beyond data breaches into physical control of equipment. The storage temperature rose because commercial cooling units are typically equipped with a heating (defrost) function for clearing frost during maintenance, and this function appears to have been operable remotely over the network. Some donated blood is a rare blood type that’s hard to replace, so a failure in frozen storage could be more than just an equipment glitch. Worth noting: Shodan, which came up in the thread, is a real tool for searching internet-connected devices. It’s normally used for security purposes like vulnerability assessments, but it has a dual-use nature – it could also serve as a way to scout targets if misused. As for whether the attacker was an AI or a human, that remains pure speculation; the original article makes no definitive claim either way.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Donated Blood Hit by Cyberattack, Temperature Set From -30°C to 110°C.”
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