Hackers Are Turning Smart Fridges Into Weapons, and Blood Banks Are the Latest Target

The Établissement Français du Sang confirmed Wednesday that cold rooms holding blood were pushed to very high temperatures on November 2. The blood itself escaped harm, the French blood service said, because alarms and quick-acting staff caught the spike and triggered fail-safes. Three of its sites were briefly affected.

The blood incident is one branch of a wider spree. Supermarket chains in at least 11 European countries have seen their refrigerator temperatures jerked upward in recent days, with photos from across the continent showing mountains of discarded food. Attacks in October hit hundreds of French stores, and in August roughly six commissaries and grocery stores on US military bases spoiled their stock the same way. The Pentagon is investigating and working with French law enforcement, Reuters reported last week.

Nobody has convincingly claimed the attacks, and it's unclear whether one crew or several are behind them. Russian hacktivists tried to take credit without offering credible evidence, and the Kremlin denied involvement this week. Some researchers still see signs of Russia-based actors in at least some incidents, while other cases point toward Iran-linked groups. NextGov/FCW reported that unnamed US officials suspect Iran-linked attackers in the military base freezer hits, though that investigation is ongoing.

The mechanics are almost embarrassingly simple. Attackers exploited unpatched refrigeration controllers left exposed to the internet, including software versions that allegedly shipped weak passwords built from the date. Many of the hacks trace back to vulnerabilities in temperature controllers made by Danish firm Danfoss, and researchers say pulling them off wasn't hard. Danfoss didn't return WIRED's request for comment, but said in other statements that affected systems were running outdated firmware and pushed customers to stay current. CISA weighed in with a Thursday alert: cold storage systems are exposed through authentication bypasses, arbitrary code injection, and sloppy configurations.

None of this is new territory. Sixteen Russian supermarkets were targeted in 2022 at the start of the war with Ukraine, and 40 Israeli stores got the same treatment that year, according to a 2025 Danfoss report. Longtime critical infrastructure researcher Josh Corman, now at the nonprofit Institute for Security and Technology, put it bluntly: our reliance on connected tech has outgrown our will to secure it, and fragile cold-chain systems are too critical to fail. Sweden's National Cyber Security Center advised companies to inventory which devices touch the internet, disconnect what they can, and patch, monitor, and lock down whatever must stay online.