Hot fridges, a fake nuclear alert and a $6bn heist: are we in the foothills of a hacking epidemic?

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As AI exposes flaws in IT systems and geopolitics plays out on the cyber frontline, some experts say the events of recent weeks could soon be a common occurence…

Alex Pearce was doing the morning rounds at his fruit and vegetable wholesale business in London on Monday last week when he noticed something odd.

The defrost light on refrigeration unit 2 was on, and the panel reading was 150C. Unit 4 was the same.

As he approached his biggest unit, its defrost light also blinked on.

It was at this point that Pearce 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 50C (122F).

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

But it is not just Pearce and a disparate group of retailers, as well as French blood banks, that have been suffering.

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) 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 said this week.

Referring to flaws in IT systems that are being exposed by AI technology, the NCSC boss, Richard 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 foray this week.

To Azeem Azhar, a tech entrepreneur and commentator, the way AI models were discovering flaws that assailants could harness recalled China’s Covid ground zero. This was, he said, a “Wuhan moment”.

Azar’s assertion headlined a Substack post that also quoted the cybersecurity executive Matthew Prince, who 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.