AI Weekly Malaysia

A suspected second wave of attacks on internet-connected supermarket refrigerators pushed units into defrost mode, spoiling food at dozens of stores in Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden, with Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt confirming the hacks overnight. A Belgian company operating Delhaize's systems told Reuters the attackers changed the fridge settings directly. Researchers attributed the earlier French incident — which spoiled food at hundreds of supermarkets last month — to connected refrigerators made by Danish firm Danfoss that no longer receives security updates, a risk Claroty flagged in August.

Why: This is a concrete case of end-of-life firmware on internet-facing devices turning into physical inventory loss: a vendor stopped shipping security updates, the settings were remotely changed to defrost, and stock was thrown out. If you deploy or integrate connected hardware (cold chain, retail, facilities) for clients, decide now what your documented support end date is, whether those devices sit on a segmented network rather than the open internet, and who eats the loss when a unit is bricked or spoofed — the article gives no CVE, firmware version or patch path, so there is no direct action item for software teams outside IoT/OT.