Thursday, October 22nd, 2026 at 11:14 PM PDT

🥵 French Fridges Forced to 50°C

The Guardian:

Hackers have forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50C overnight, in an “unprecedented” cyber-attack affecting several hundred stores across the country, with fires and food losses reported.

That's 122° F.

The affected units “were running outdated firmware”, Danfoss said, adding that it had “long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions”.

Most people—including large and small groups of people, like businesses—are really bad at keeping their firmware up to date. That goes double for things that exited for a long time without firmware, like appliances. It goes triple for things that people may not realize are even connected to the Internet. A lot of people just don't realize things like toasters, ovens, and fridges are online or that they need to be updated, especially when those things are working fine.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, a strong supporter of Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion, last month ordered measures to protect France’s critical infrastructure from Russian “hybrid attacks”.

If we're lucky, the next several months are going to be really rough. As the capabilities of LLMs increase, so does their danger. Every day more potential bad actors realize how easy it is to take advantage of old, unpatched systems and, in some cases, how easy it is to find latent vulnerabilities in up to date code. Every day, more LLM agents are being turned loose to accomplish their goals however they see fit, and sometimes that means they break containment or cause unintended side effects. It wouldn't surprise me if the attack described in this story was carried out intentionally by Russia, but it also wouldn't surprise me if this happened as an unintended side effect of LLM agents trying to accomplish something entirely unrelated.

Again, that's if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, we won't be dealing with more and more of this kind of thing for months, we'll be dealing with it for years.

But it's not all doom and gloom. The people trying to keep everything online and secure can fight fire with fire. The same LLMs causing these problems can be used to find and fix more issues before they're exploited. LLMs can also help teams respond quickly when something goes off the rails.

I don't like LLMs, but I can't deny their utility in some areas.

It's an interesting time to be alive.