Hot fridges, a fake nuclear alert and a $6bn heist: is the world on the brink of a hacking epidemic?

Alex Pearce, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler in London, noticed something odd while doing his morning rounds last Monday. The defrost light on one of his refrigeration units was on, and the panel was reading 150 degrees Celsius. Unit four was the same. As he approached his biggest unit, its defrost light was blinking on too.

At that point he thought: is this a cyber-attack? He walked over to the box connecting the units to the internet and yanked out the cable.

On the same day, retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported similar problems, with refrigerators and freezers in some shops soaring to as high as 50 degrees Celsius.

Pearce said, 'If it had happened on a Saturday morning, when I don't tend to be here, it could ultimately have led to a fire.'

But it was not just Pearce and that disparate group of retailers who were suffering: French blood banks were affected too. The hacking attack was one of three over a number of days.

On 30 October, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, was robbed of $6.3bn (4.7bn pounds) in a record heist, and on 1 November hackers targeted Ukraine's emergency alert app, sending people in Kyiv a fake nuclear strike alert.

The official message after the fridge attacks is: expect more disruption. We are in the 'foothills' of a new hacking landscape, the head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Richard Horne, said this week.

Referring to flaws in IT systems that are being exposed by AI technology, Horne said: 'There are so many vulnerabilities out there that ... you could say are waiting to be exploited.' He added: 'The most serious risk we face in the short term is just a huge rise in the volume of incidents ... and I think you could probably point to the last few months and say we've started to see that.'

Websites around the world were temporarily taken out of service as a precaution last month when AI technology from the ChatGPT developer OpenAI helped discover a flaw in PHP, a computer language used to build much of the world wide web. French supermarket fridges were also attacked last month in what could have been a trial run for the more expansive attack this week.

To Azeem Azhar, a tech entrepreneur and commentator, the way AI models were discovering flaws that attackers could harness recalled China's Covid ground zero. This was, he said, a 'Wuhan moment'. Cybersecurity executive Matthew Prince said last month: 'We're going to have a couple of years where every single week it's going to feel like the sky is falling.'

There are two factors underpinning the NCSC warnings: geopolitics and AI. At least one expert has said the fridge attacks bear Russian hallmarks, while the Binance hack has been attributed to the North Korean state, and Russia is naturally a suspect in the Ukraine incident.

The NCSC said last week that AI-powered malicious software was 'highly likely' to be used in hacking attacks against the UK's power stations, airports and hospitals by 2028. AI would help attackers with tasks such as scouting targets, locating weaknesses in IT networks and writing malicious code, the organisation said.

But there are caveats. The NCSC's director of operations, Paul Chichester, said the cold storage hackers 'really didn't need' to use AI to discover the fridge flaws because they were already out there, including default access passwords that were published in one fridge operating company's manuals. Sophos, a leading cybersecurity firm, said it had not seen any major incidents among its clients related to the PHP glitch, although, like others in the industry, it had seen a significant number of attempts to take advantage of the vulnerability.

And one expert said we had been here before. Ciaran Martin, the founding chief executive of the NCSC, played down the 'Wuhan moment' comparison. This was not the first time the world had faced a concerted threat, he said, pointing to the NotPetya and WannaCry cyber-attacks in 2017, which have been blamed on Russia and North Korea respectively, and a surge in ransomware attacks in 2021. 'It's a bad run, but it's not unprecedented,' Martin said. 'The idea that we are having a Wuhan moment is not true. We are having one of those waves of incidents that happen every few years.'