THE CRUNCH
Hackers accessed control systems and raised temperatures at three cold stores holding vital blood products, France's national blood service (EFS) has said. The service said temperature and defrosting thresholds were pushed to "very high levels" in the overnight attack on Monday, but its alarm systems let technicians intervene before any products were compromised.
EFS, which supplies blood, plasma and platelets to more than 1,900 hospitals and supports over a million patients a year, said it was not directly targeted: the attack hit cold stores run by its contractors. Products in the affected rooms, including plasma bags for transfusions and medicine manufacturing, were moved to other sites. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI and the health ministry have been alerted, and monitoring of all its equipment has been reinforced.
The incident appears to be an escalation of a wider campaign against internet-connected fridges and freezers across Europe, in which hackers last month seized control of cooling units in as many as 700 supermarkets in France. Supermarket refrigeration in almost a dozen countries has been hit, with temperatures soaring as high as 50C and millions of euros of food damage reported. Retailers in Italy, Germany, Romania and the UK were targeted on Tuesday, after Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported problems the previous day.
No motive is known and no one has claimed responsibility. Rafe Pilling, senior director for threat intelligence at Sophos, told the Guardian the most plausible attribution scenarios were a "state-based signalling and demonstration of capability" or a lone-wolf hacker. An EU spokesperson, Thomas Regnier, said the bloc's agencies were holding urgent talks with national authorities on a collective response, adding: "These are not isolated incidents and of course we have to be collectively resilient and prepared for such cyber incidents."