Tens of Millions of Euros in Losses in France: How Can Danfoss Controllers Be Exploited? Does the Company Bear Any Responsibility? Is AI Enabling the Weaponization of Publicly Available Information?

In light of the recent attacks on refrigeration systems in supermarkets across nine European countries, as well as on several blood banks in France, it would be prudent for cybersecurity professionals to analyse the factors that may have been involved, in order to identify valuable lessons.

According to Euronews :

“Hackers exploited weak cybersecurity and vulnerabilities in manufacturer Danfoss’s AK-SM refrigeration system manager to put fridges and freezers on defrost settings, in some cases temperatures were set as high [as] 50 degrees Celsius”.

In the first wave, which affected hundreds of French supermarkets on the night of 11–12 October, Danfoss stated that the compromised devices were primarily end-of-life AK-SM 800 and AK-SC 355 controllers, which no longer receive security updates, along with some…