00:00A new warning about Europe's vulnerability to cyberattacks.
00:04From supermarket refrigeration systems across the continent to blood bank facilities in France,
00:09hackers are increasingly targeting the digital systems that keep our societies running
00:14and potentially putting lives at risk.
00:17Is this just cybercrime or are we witnessing a new front in hybrid warfare against Europe?
00:23Joining me now is Professor Kevin Caron, cybersecurity expert at Ulster University in the UK.
00:29Good morning to you.
00:30Good morning.
00:31So what exactly are hackers doing?
00:34How can someone sitting behind a computer remotely take control of the supermarket's refrigerators
00:41or blood bank's cooling systems?
00:44Yes, these operational technology is becoming more common, especially in the wake of COVID,
00:52where a lot of technicians were not able to travel to remote sites.
00:57Therefore, it seemed to be easier to install remote monitoring systems as well, which can be logged into remotely.
01:04You're able to check the temperature, able to control the temperature.
01:08And, of course, these fridges, again, need evaporation circuits turned on daily, actually, to run so that the fridge doesn't
01:16become iced up, of course.
01:18Now, you know, on paper, it's a good idea, of course.
01:21But the fact is, these were very weak.
01:24The controllers that are used to be able to log into from anywhere in the world, that one of them,
01:32for instance, doesn't have any updates for basically 10 years, the other one for five years.
01:38The flaws have been known for a number of years, the way that you can log in remotely without even
01:44needing to authenticate.
01:46And yet, of course, a few last month in France, again, fridges were attacked.
01:51And then this week, fridges were attacked again.
01:55So lessons were not learned the first time.
01:58On this note, so supermarket refrigerators are hardly considered critical infrastructure, yet the failure can cause millions of euros and
02:06losses.
02:07Have companies underestimated the cybersecurity risks of everyday technology?
02:14Unfortunately, it seems not.
02:17People have to consider, and companies, of course, you know, does anything that can be connected to the Internet, should
02:24it be?
02:25In cases like this, best practice in cybersecurity was not handled.
02:30Quite often, the default passwords were never changed again.
02:35They didn't use any kind of what we call a VPN for good practice to access these units as well.
02:43So, in fact, there were so many things wrong, and it is not a sophisticated attack.
02:49In this case, AI was not used.
02:52But it's worth noting, in the last week, we have seen a dramatic rise in cyberattacks, as we speak.
03:01Unprecedented, actually.
03:04We have this common database, which is shared around the world by all the technology companies.
03:09Whenever an exploit is found, like in this case, this would have been recorded many years ago.
03:14It goes into a database.
03:16Ten years ago, this database, the average number of per month of exploits that were found was about 30 to
03:2340.
03:24Last month, this common vulnerable exploitation database added a new 17,060 attacks.
03:34Junkiesec Truman
03:35Sam Duskiewski
03:35It is the only 14,060 attacks.
03:38It all happens.
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