Pentagon investigates freezer outages at military commissaries as possible cyberattack

The attack on French supermarkets affected 80 Carrefour locations, about two dozen Monoprix stores, and 150 Intermarche stores. The Paris prosecutor's office called the outages a "large-scale" attack. Combined stock damages at two chains, Intermarché and E.Leclerc, were estimated at €270,000 (about $300,000), according to local news outlet Sud Ouest.

In the United States, more than a half-dozen commissaries were impacted by freezer disruptions in August, including at Fort Irwin, California; Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico; and Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island, the Military Times reported. The Substack Signal and Silence first reported the possibility that the outages were a result of a hack. The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service is leading a joint investigation into the outages. The Pentagon said in a statement to Fortune: "For security reasons, we do not comment on ongoing law enforcement investigations."

There is no evidence yet that the two events are connected, or that the commissary failures were a hack at all. But Christopher Whyte, an associate professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University, said, "You'd be silly not to be suspicious." "Refrigerators give an attacker a weirdly direct route to financial loss that's, with cyber, unusually irreversible."

In France, the vulnerabilities originated from access to Danish-made Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC series remote controllers, as well as Copeland xweb and Dixell xweb; affected units were running outdated firmware that hackers could exploit, according to an alert bulletin published by French authorities. Nadiya Kostyuk, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, said it was an ongoing joke among her cohort to discuss when their home fridges would be hacked. "I'm surprised that it took so long," she said.

Gregory Winger, an assistant professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, argued the U.S. was strategic to launch a joint investigation with France from an information-sharing standpoint. "Right now, every future military operation is going to have a cyber component to it," he said.