SuperValu stores hit by suspected cyber attack

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk, with Ciara.

Ciara Kelly (0:10)

Refrigeration systems at 13 SuperValu stores across Ireland have been affected by a suspected cyber attack resulting in fresh produce having been thrown away and hundreds of thousands of euros. In losses, a business reporter with the Irish Times, Ian Curran, has the details. Good evening to you, Ian.

Tell us what's happened to SuperValu, but they are not alone in this, are they? There's also Sweden, Belgium and France affected.

Ian Curran (0:35)

Good evening. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, certainly not alone today.

A spate of cyber attacks have been reported across Europe on refrigeration systems in a number of different supermarket chains. Unclear whether the SuperValu incident is fully related to those incidents, but obviously it would be quite the coincidence and obviously it comes just two weeks after a major attack on a number of supermarkets affecting, I think 700 outlets in France. So yeah, certainly a spate of attacks across the continent.

Ciara Kelly (1:05)

Do we know or do we have any insight into what this attack is meant to achieve?

Ian Curran (1:12)

Very unclear at the moment. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack and it's not been immediately clear what the motivation for it was. Some experts have said that it is increasingly the case that financial benefit, direct financial benefit is not the main motivation for these kinds of attacks, that it is the disruption itself and the ability to do that.

That's the effect and so that's all we have right now. I think it would be slightly responsible maybe to suggest who it might be behind it, but certainly it is a new vector of cyber security issue that we're facing.

Ciara Kelly (1:48)

Certainly, though, we can't outrule a bad actor, a state as a bad actor, I suppose, considering that they're not necessarily looking for money or ransom, but they are, it would appear, aiming for disruption. For people listening, and I know you're not a tech journalist, Ian, any more than I am, but this is a monitoring system for these fridges that's been hacked and the monitoring system makes sure that the fridges are at the right temperature, so the food is safe, basically. People might have a smart fridge in their own house that they can talk to on their phones or what have you, and that's this on a bigger scale. And now they've hacked that system, which means that they were able to either turn off the fridges or in some cases, I believe, turn them up to really high temperatures.

Ian Curran (2:29)

Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head there. I think in some cases in France and Spain, temperatures were turned up, you know, destroying some of the stock, and in other cases, temperatures were turned down and stock was frozen and fridges had to be defrosted. But I think it's worth noting here that, you know, Musgraves, the owner of SuperValu said today that their monitoring systems actually caught the incident itself and it was flagged to them sort of, I think, in the early hours of the morning and they sort of scrambled and were able to kind of keep the shops that were affected open and they were also able to resolve the issue in the last couple of hours. We had a new statement for them this evening saying that those issues have been fully resolved. And so in some ways, I suppose it is a good news story about their own cyber defense that it was able to take a spot and flag these issues, but in another sense, obviously, a worrying trend.

Ciara Kelly (3:16)

Yeah, and they said it was only one type of refrigeration system that was affected and that no food has been sold in any of their shops that was of any danger to the public. So if anybody is concerned about that. Do we know if anything what happens next, Ian, in terms of, I suppose, supermarkets might try and change their systems to not be as vulnerable by perhaps changing systems in some way?

Ian Curran (3:42)

Yeah, certainly. I think there's been some work done recently to discussing retail as a particularly vulnerable sector when it comes to cybersecurity issues.

In some ways, as you know, you suggest it could be a blessing in disguise. It could force a rethink in terms of how retailers do that. And I think that that's particularly important in the era of kind of just in time delivery when our food supply chains are so speedy, but they're often quite brittle.

Something that we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic when global shipping was affected by port delays and all of those matters. So it's something that could be, in a way, a sort of a blessing in disguise in a sense if it does force that kind of rethink of how those systems operate. But certainly a worrying trend in a lot of ways because of that brittleness of the food supply system and how much food will be imported.