A Nobel dating app, hacked refrigerators, and more

Hey folks,Imagine BlinkIt and Zepto don’t exist, and you walk into a supermarket to grab milk and some ice cream.

You head to the refrigerated section, open the freezer door, and reach for your favourite brand.Everything looks normal, and the freezer is humming away. Except someone hacked the cooling system. And instead of keeping your food frozen, the machine is heating up.Sounds absurd, doesn't it?After all, we tend to think of cyberattacks as someone stealing passwords, draining bank accounts, or bringing websites crashing down. And the idea that a hacker could spoil your groceries by tampering with a refrigerator sounds like something out of a particularly strange episode of Black Mirror.But that's exactly what happened in France this week.Hackers targeted refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, and some units reached 50°C, spoiling fresh and frozen food.

More on this story

At some stores, the overheating equipment also produced smoke and fire.So, how does someone hack a refrigerator in the first place? And more importantly, why would a supermarket's cooling system even be connected to the internet?To understand that, we need to look at how modern refrigeration works. A large supermarket doesn't rely on someone checking every freezer manually.