Hackers’ latest playground: the real world

TL;DR: It’s official: Hackers aren’t just targeting your phone anymore, and two major cyberattacks over the past week could be a preview of what’s to come. Cybercriminals are going after everything from the food you can buy to what’s on the billboards during your morning commute—often by exploiting the software behind the things you encounter IRL.

What happened: Overnight, hackers switched freezers to defrost at supermarkets in seven European countries, setting temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit and spoiling food. It’s the second attack like this in less than a month: In October, a nearly identical hack hit hundreds of French supermarkets, destroying food and reportedly starting fires at several stores. One chain’s CEO estimated losses in the tens of millions of euros in a single day.

Attackers are getting creative elsewhere, too. Last week, a hacking group got digital billboards in Egypt, Malaysia, and Brazil (and reportedly more) to play porn, including one over a busy highway. (Times Square, now is a pretty good time to check your security.)

Global entry: It’s happening stateside, too. The Pentagon is reportedly investigating whether hackers pulled a similar freezer trick at six US military base grocery stores in August. And last year, a slew of crosswalk buttons in Silicon Valley and Seattle started talking in AI-generated voices that imitated Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos after they were hacked (let’s just say fake Bezos was not media trained).

The weakest link: But what do these wide-ranging attacks have in common? As it turns out: vulnerable software. Both freezer attacks targeted refrigeration control systems—the manufacturers say most affected units are older models that no longer get security updates. The group that claimed the billboard hacks said it exploited a flaw in the software that sends content to LED screens and found thousands of exposed systems with just a two-hour automated scan. (It was apparently so easy, the group said, that “anyone with two brain cells” could’ve done it.) And some crosswalk buttons can be taken over through default passwords nobody changed, per a security researcher.

Bottom line: As more of the world goes online, hackers don’t need your password to ruin your day. Until the tech around you gets better security, the screens and machines you see could be a target for playing hentai—or worse, a Rickroll. —LC