Stefan Grobe speaks to Kevin Curran, Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Ulster.
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Commenting on the recent failures of freezers in both European retail and healthcare sectors, he explains that the cause is primarily from a COVID-era change where technicians required to access and service fridges while off-site. However, these controllers permitting off-site access have in many cases not had updates "for basically 10 years."
Flaws "have been known for a number of years," permitting malicious actors to log in "without even needing to authenticate." On companies ignoring these vulnerabilities, he says "lessons were not learned", given the age of the vulnerabilities. He adds that companies also fail to follow best practice with cybersecurity, with the supermarket cases showing default passwords unchanged, nor VPNs being used.
Curran calls the attacks "not sophisticated," but also notes that in the last week we have seen an "unpresented" and "dramatic rise" in cyber attacks, with newly discovered exploits jumping to 17,060 in the last month. For context he adds that 10 years ago, the average number of new exploits per month "was about 30 to 40."
In recent weeks, several retail chains have had significant cyberattack-related freezer failures, causing multi-million euro losses in frozen and refrigerated goods. Yesterday, several blood banks in France were affected by a similar cyberattack, though this was spotted and fixed before blood products could spoil.
