It’s a bad day to be a pint of ice cream in a French supermarket.
What happened: A major cyberattack struck hundreds of supermarkets across France, remotely altering fridge temperatures, starting fires, and spoiling millions of euros’ worth of food.
Hackers were able to remotely trigger forced defrosting cycles in the affected supermarkets’ refrigerators, raising temperatures to as high as 50 C overnight, spoiling food and causing fires and floods.
French officials said that companies in other European countries may also be affected, but released few details of their investigation. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, as of writing.
Why it matters: After decades of hooking everything up to the internet in the name of convenience and efficiency, we’re now discovering that comes with some serious downsides — like the ability for hackers to disrupt an entire country’s food supply chain, for example.
Cyberattacks are likely to become more of a problem as AI models become more powerful, with less sophisticated actors able to use AI tools to carry out more frequent and damaging hacks (though there’s no evidence so far this particular breach was facilitated by AI).
Last month, researchers uncovered a case of a single hacker using AI to launch cyberattacks against as many as 100 organizations and steal the details of more than 600,000 credit cards.
Zoom out: Leaders at Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing for the public backlash that would follow a large-scale, AI-enabled cyberattack targeting a major bank or critical infrastructure, like a water or power utility. Many expect such an attack to happen within the next six to 12 months.
