Signal//Noise #039 - The French Dis-Connection

So what this has to do with a couple of major French grocery store chains basically got their freezer, refrigerator subsystems.

They were attacked by, by cyber criminals.

And, you know, again, it's you would really consider this a third party compromise because of the capabilities that were needed to actually go and compromise.

These things were, you know, were not state of the art.

A lot of this stuff was end of life sort of interfaces.

And, you know, if you've never actually gone and looked at some of the management panels on industrial equipment before, you shouldn't be surprised at anything that you see, right.

Anything from command line access to these, you know, miserable little portals that are just terrible.

You know, they're old, the 80s.

You'll see everything.

When you're working with industrial equipment, there'll be some stuff that the software hasn't changed in decades, right?

Yeah, let's put it this way.

It's maybe more difficult stealing a banana from the grocery store than it was to do this.

Yeah, they didn't have to get out of their chair to do this, right? So the bad guys basically found a way into the control and management systems of this particular brand of um cooler which was you know obviously what happens with these yeah they make you know it's like walmart and costco and sam's here in the u.s they buy if you go look if you go look at their freezer equipment it's all going to be the same brand you know because they just buy this all in bulk or they they work out where the manufacturer to have it specifically manufactured for them and so it's all very consistent and the same across the board and that's what was going on here And it basically found vulnerability.

There were some vulnerabilities that were advertised or told.

They made it public how you could get into some of these devices last year sometime, 2025, during 2025.

So when that happened, it just turns out that this year, like we were talking about, 11, 12, 13, 14, somebody got a thought in their head about going to all these major festivals.

food chains, the grocery store chains, two majors, and they started shutting out the freezers and refrigerators.

And they did it in such a way that nobody caught on to it right away.

So I don't know if you – you should be able to think about that for just a minute and understand kind of how big – let's just say – Is it Brookshires? Brookshires is big in Texas, right? Yeah,

Brookshires is, but they're smaller and smaller towns.

I mean, H-E-B.

Okay, so H-E-B.

Let's just say H-E-B, for example.

Yeah, let's say H-E-B is a good one,

yeah.