Cyberattack on the fridges: the cold gives way, the bill lands on everyone else

According to Le Monde, hackers took control, during the night of 1 to 2 November, of Internet-connected refrigeration regulation systems in supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Luxembourg and Ireland. As in the attack on food stores in France in October, software from the Danish company Danfoss was once again targeted.

That is what we know, and it is little. The dispatch does not say how many stores are affected, how much stock has been lost, who the attackers are, or what the chains intend to do. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First remark: we have plugged freezers into the Internet. Not out of a passion for technology, but because monitoring the cold remotely costs less than employing people to do it. Just-in-time delivery, lean stocks, centralised supervision: it is the same religion of saving on time and hands. When the system falls, there is no one left to save the dairy aisle, in the literal sense.

Second remark: who pays? The chains, the optimists will say, and their insurers. Perhaps. But experience teaches that losses flow downward: shop-floor staff who throw out, restock, and stretch their shifts to put everything back in order, without anyone mentioning a bonus. The gain, meanwhile, was privatised during the years when everything worked. Our working notes recall that productivity gains never reach wages; it is consistent that the risks of this productivity do not reach them either, except to be dumped on them.

Third remark, the bitterest: the food. Tonnes of produce destroyed because a thermostat was hacked, on a continent that lectures the poorest on the proper use of food aid. Capital produces the goods, then destroys them without a qualm when they can no longer be sold, the hunger of some being nothing more than insolvent demand. Marx already observed, about the factories, that capital willingly wastes "the living substance of the workers" rather than its coal (our translation, Capital, Book I). Today it is the cold chain that is being protected, and even then, badly.

So let us not accuse the hackers of inventing fragility. They found it ready-made, sold by software vendors and written off by employees. The real question, which neither the chains nor the software publishers will raise on their own: who decides what level of risk is acceptable, and who foots the bill? As long as the same people decide and others pay, the next hack will find its ground prepared.