Hackers pushed freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets to 122 degrees. Now the Pentagon is asking whether the same thing hit U.S. military bases

The Pentagon’s criminal investigators are leading a joint probe into freezer failures at U.S. military commissaries in August, and four officials told Reuters this week that the Pentagon is treating them as a possible cyberattack. It comes weeks after hackers took over the refrigeration controls at hundreds of French supermarkets overnight.

There’s no proof yet that the two are connected, or that the commissary failures were a hack at all. But the same kind of target experienced the same type of outage within about two months of each other, which is enough to raise the eyebrows of Christopher Whyte, an associate professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

“You’d be silly not to be suspicious,” he told Fortune. 

For the stores, the damage can’t be undone: Two supermarkets, Intermarché and E.Leclerc, reported an estimated €270,000, about $300,000 in combined stock damages, according to local news outlet Sud Ouest.

“Refrigerators give an attacker a weirdly direct route…to financial loss that’s, with cyber, unusually irreversible,” Whyte said. “You can’t unspoil food or other products from these freezers. It’s just Euros and dollars down the drain.”

Napoleon Bonaparte, the French military general who met an infamous defeat in Russia after overextending his supplies, is credited as saying, “An army marches on its stomach.”

The aphorism, also attributed to Prussian King Frederick the Great, refers to the necessity of food and basic logistics for a military campaign’s success. It’s not surprising, then, that refrigeration may be the next frontier of widespread cybersecurity attacks.

Earlier this month, hackers targeted hundreds of French supermarkets, raising the temperature of their refrigeration and freezer........

© Fortune