Pentagon officials suspect hackers went after the military’s commissary freezers, according to Reuters.

Four officials said Defense Department investigators are treating a string of freezer malfunctions at military bases in August as a suspected hack, with one adding that investigators spoke to their French counterparts after hackers attacked supermarket freezers across France earlier this month. The Pentagon told Reuters in a statement that a unit of Cyber Command is “working in close ​coordination with interagency and law enforcement partners” on the issue, while Army criminal investigators confirmed they are collaborating with French police.

The blog Signal and Silence was the first to raise suspicions about the issue in late August, writing that they were “self-aware enough to know this sounds insane,” but “there is a nonzero chance someone has hacked the commissary freezers.” That post identified 14 reported commissary/freezer outages at military installations in 11 states. (Reuters confirmed at least six.)

S. Army Fort Huachuca had clarified there was no power outage, but that the freezer went into “defrost mode where it heated up all the food. '” The Pentagon’s Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) imposes engineering specifications requiring defrost be “controlled through the RMCS [Remote Monitoring Control System],” and one procurement document shows RMCS is in place at 182 sites, including all 14 on the list. The blog also catalogued posts showing that commissaries at bases including New Mexico’s Holloman AFB, California’s Fort Irwin, and Rhode Island’s Naval Station Newport had all posted notices about refrigeration failures that kept chilled and frozen goods off shelves.

Source link