Cyberattacks hit meat processing companies in Britain — The Guardian
In the United Kingdom, cyberattacks affected meat processing companies following incidents involving refrigeration systems in European supermarkets. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre said it was working with affected companies, while the overall impact on the country remains minimal, The Guardian reports.
Refrigeration system disruptions
According to the centre’s operations director, Paul Chichester, specialists are monitoring the situation and helping organisations identify and close technological vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. He said the attacks were not linked to artificial intelligence and used vulnerabilities that had been known for a long time.
On Monday, retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported problems with refrigeration equipment. In some cases, temperatures in the units rose to 50°C. Similar incidents had previously occurred in France: the targeted systems there operated on outdated technologies connected to the internet with default factory passwords.
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No British grocery chain was directly affected. At the same time, the British Association of Independent Meat Suppliers told the BBC that the incidents affected several of its members. At one company, temperatures in refrigeration units reached 100°C, while two others reported that equipment was defrosting. According to the association, the units were empty at the time, so no products were lost.
Signs of a possible link to Russian operations
Cybersecurity researchers recorded attempted attacks on test controllers for Danfoss refrigeration equipment, deliberately placed online as traps for hackers. Lupovis reported 256 attempted attacks from 91 different sources between 20 and 30 October.
Lupovis CEO Xavier Bellekens said that most login attempts used publicly available factory usernames and passwords. He also pointed to a match between the infrastructure used in this probing and infrastructure that the company had previously linked to malicious operations associated with Russia. At the same time, he stressed that it has not yet been possible to identify a specific group.
