袋装冷冻蓝莓和瑞典肉丸、包装华夫饼和披萨，以及一桶桶冰淇淋：全部融化、软塌、变质、发臭。在欧洲各地的杂货店，冰箱和冷柜遭到黑客攻击后，呈现出的就是这一景象。
Bags of frozen blueberries and Swedish meatballs, packets of waffles and pizzas, and tub after tub of ice cream: all melted, floppy, spoiled, and stinking. This has been the scene at grocery stores across Europe after their fridges and freezers have been hacked.
上个月，法国数百家超市的员工上班时发现，不得不丢弃价值数百万美元的食品。这些设备并非只是被停用；它们被远程劫持并重新编程，温度被调高至华氏 122 度（约 50 摄氏度）。上周一，包括爱沙尼亚、比利时和瑞典在内的至少七个国家的杂货店也发生了几乎相同的事件。同一天，法国国家血库的冷冻柜也遭到黑客攻击（不过工作人员及时干预，未导致任何样本受损）。
Last month, employees at hundreds of supermarkets in France came into work to find they had to trash millions of dollars’ worth of food. The machines were not simply deactivated; they had been remotely hijacked and reprogrammed to hit temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Last Monday, grocery outlets in at least seven more countries, including Estonia, Belgium, and Sweden, experienced a near-identical incident. The same day, freezers at the French national blood bank were also hacked (though staffers were able to intervene before any samples were corrupted).
对于美国是否会成为下一个目标，或已遭攻击，说法不一：8 月，五角大楼低调披露，几个美国军事基地军需品商店的冷冻柜发生故障，疑似遭到攻击。
Depending on who you talk with, America is either next or has already been hit: In August, the Pentagon quietly revealed that freezers at commissaries on several U.S. military bases had malfunctioned in a suspected attack.
没有任何组织或个人宣称对这些攻击负责，甚至不清楚这些事件是否有关联。黑客似乎没有除制造混乱和造成大量食物浪费以外的其他目的。这些大规模冰箱攻击或许最令人惊讶的地方在于，它们竟然没有更早发生。对黑客而言，这些设备是完美的攻击目标。
No one has claimed responsibility for any of these exploits, and it’s not even clear whether they are connected. The hackers seemingly didn’t have a goal besides sowing chaos and wasting an enormous amount of food. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these widespread fridge attacks is that they haven’t happened sooner. For hackers, these appliances make perfect targets.
根本问题在于，许多冰箱和冰柜如今都已连接互联网。“攻击手段非常简单，”卡内基梅隆大学网络安全研究员娜迪亚·科斯丘克告诉我。每台设备都有一个连接到局域网的微控制器，因此即使是坐在数千英里外电脑前的人，理论上也能访问它。这些设备通常都有密码保护，但仍往往相当容易被破解，科斯丘克解释道。“通常采用暴力破解”，即向设备不断发送一个又一个密码，直到其中一个奏效。
The basic problem is that many fridges and freezers are now connected to the internet. “The attacks are very simple,” Nadiya Kostyuk, a cybersecurity researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. Each unit has a microcontroller that is connected to the local network, so even someone sitting at a computer thousands of miles away can theoretically access it. These devices are typically password protected, but they still tend to be pretty easy to crack, Kostyuk explained. “Usually it’s done by brute force,” which is to say the devices are spammed with password after password until one works.
由于用户名和密码从未从制造商的默认设置中更改过，一些近期的攻击变得更加简单。一旦黑客远程闯入系统，他们就能控制一个加热元件，该元件可定期开启以防止霜冻在蒸发器盘管上积聚，否则会降低冰柜的工作效率。在被指令反复运行后，该加热元件已被证明能将易腐食品“煮熟”。
Some of the recent attacks were made simpler because usernames and passwords had never been changed from the manufacturer’s defaults. Once the hackers remotely broke into a system, they were able to take control of a heating element that can be periodically switched on to prevent frost from building up on the evaporator coils, which stops the freezer from working as effectively. Instructed to run repeatedly, that heating element has proved capable of cooking perishable food.
对于家用冰箱而言，其带来的便利——可显示家庭照片的触摸屏、内置摄像头让你在杂货店也能查看库存——可能抵不上安全风险。在近期攻击发生后，人们假设工业冰箱也是如此：但对于我们的食物从农田到餐桌途中所经历的数百万台超市冷藏柜、冷藏车和冷藏集装箱，以及巨大的冷藏仓库来说，得失计算截然不同。
For a home fridge, the benefits—a touchscreen that can show family photos, an interior camera so you can see what you already have while you’re at the grocery store—may not outweigh the security risks. In the aftermath of the recent attacks, people have assumed the same is true for industrial fridges: But for the millions of supermarket chill cabinets, refrigerated trucks and shipping containers, and gigantic cold-storage warehouses that our food sits in on its way from farm to table, the calculus is quite different.
物流公司通常需要证明食品在其保管期间始终处于一个狭窄的温度范围内；如果冰柜温度在凌晨 2 点偏离设定值并能发出警报，这是一项极其有用的功能。制冷机组始终处于运行状态——它们的设计要求是全天候 24/7 运转——而当今许多最智能的设备提供诊断功能，使公司能够实施预测性维护，以防患于未然。“如果机组停机，损失风险极高，”佐治亚理工学院供应链专家、曾任可口可乐物流负责人的 Chris Gaffney 告诉我。
Logistics companies are often required to demonstrate that food has stayed within a narrow temperature range while in their custody; the ability for a freezer to broadcast an alert if its temperature deviates from a set point at 2 a.m. is an extremely useful feature. Refrigeration units are always on—they have to run 24/7 by design—and a lot of today’s smartest devices provide the diagnostics that allow companies to perform predictive maintenance to preempt any potential issues. “The risk of loss is so high if the unit goes down,” Chris Gaffney, a supply-chain expert at Georgia Tech who previously ran logistics for Coca-Cola, told me.
我们冰箱所守护的食物极其脆弱；制冷设备本身相当复杂；而合格技术人员却严重短缺。盖夫尼说，冷藏仓库更别说超市了，现场根本不会配备具备那种专业技能的人员。但一旦接入互联网，分散的冷冻设备组合就能被远程管理，甚至有时能远程维修。而且，随着政客们推动立法要求食品可追溯，整个供应链正在实现数字化。“这带来了很多积极影响——增加粮食安全的途径，以及了解食物来源的途径，”全球冷链联盟（一个行业贸易组织）总裁萨拉·斯蒂克勒告诉我。“但数字化也带来了风险。”
The food that our fridges are protecting is extremely fragile; the machines themselves are quite complex; and qualified technicians are in short supply. A refrigerated warehouse, let alone a supermarket, won’t have a person with that kind of specialist skill set on-site, Gaffney said. But when connected to the internet, a scattered portfolio of freezers can be managed and sometimes even fixed remotely. And, as politicians push legislation to make food traceable, the entire supply chain is being digitized. “There are a lot of positives that come with that—ways to increase our food security and understanding where food is coming from,” Sara Stickler, the president of the Global Cold Chain Alliance, an industry trade group, told me. “But with digitization, there also comes risks.”
食品行业不像银行业，网络安全是公司价值主张的核心。在易腐物流领域，任务是保持食品低温，仓库运营商和杂货店通常看不出在网络安全上额外投入的价值。“利润微薄，”盖夫尼说。谈到采用复杂的新技术时，他告诉我，“物流业是落后者，而在物流业中，冷链又是落后者。”黑客攻击制冷系统的精妙与恐怖之处在于：尽管冷链是基础设施，却未被视作基础设施对待。
The food business isn’t like banking, where online security is central to a company’s value proposition. In perishable logistics, where the mission is keeping food cold, warehouse operators and grocery stores have not typically seen the value in spending extra on cybersecurity. “Margins are tough,” Gaffney said. When it comes to adopting sophisticated new technology, he told me, “logistics is a laggard, and within logistics, cold is a laggard.”The genius and horror of hacking refrigeration is that although the cold chain is essential infrastructure, it’s not treated as such.
正如我在撰写《》（我最近关于该主题的新书）时迅速了解到的，几乎没人对制冷业的范围和规模有完整认识。美国人餐桌上近四分之三的食物在抵达餐桌前都要经过冷链。成千上万个冷藏仓库、冷藏集装箱和卡车、肉类冷库、香蕉催熟室隐匿在地下、港口、高速公路交汇处附近或牧场旁：把这些人造寒冬的区域加在一起，它们构成了我们食品系统隐形的脊梁。
As I quickly learned while writing , my recent book on the topic, almost no one has a complete picture of refrigeration’s scope and scale. Nearly three-quarters of everything on the American plate passes through the cold chain on its way to our tables. Thousands of chilled warehouses, refrigerated containers and trucks, meat lockers, and banana-ripening rooms are located out of sight, underground, at ports, near freeway intersections or cattle ranches: Added together, these pockets of artificial winter form the invisible backbone of our food system.
与此同时，制冷设施与其他关键基础设施（如水处理厂或发电站）有所不同——公众可能对这些设施知之甚少，但至少行业从业者和政府官员掌握着我们拥有多少此类设施以及它们位于何处的信息。在新冠疫情早期超市货架被抢空之际，一位行业专家告诉我，他接到了一位政府高级官员惊慌失措的电话，询问该国食品供应依赖多少冷藏车和冷库。
Meanwhile, refrigeration is somehow different from other crucial infrastructure—water-treatment plants, say, or power stations—where the public may be ignorant, but at least industry members and government officials are on top of how many facilities we have and where they are. As supermarket shelves emptied during the early days of COVID, one industry expert told me that he received a frantic call from a senior official in the government asking how many refrigerated trucks and warehouses the country’s food supply depended on.
如果这些袭击有一线希望的话，那就是它们可能成为一个警钟。“有了这些网络攻击，‘关键基础设施’的定义完全被重写了，”科斯秋克说。毕竟，网络攻击并非威胁我们食品供应链的唯一因素：今年夏天英国各地数十家超市的冷藏柜在热浪推高温度至极限之上后失效，而由恶劣天气引发的停电也是持续的威胁。无论罪魁祸首是黑客还是天气，后果都是一样的。请习惯看到更多空荡荡的超市货架吧。
If there is a silver lining to these attacks, it is that they could serve as a wake-up call. “With these cyberattacks, it totally redefines what ‘critical infrastructure’ is,” Kostyuk said. After all, cyberattacks are not the only threat facing our food-supply chain: Dozens of supermarket refrigerators across the U.K. failed this summer during a heatwave that pushed them beyond their limits, and severe-weather-induced blackouts are a constant threat. Whether the culprit is a hacker or the weather, the outcome remains the same. Get used to seeing more empty supermarket shelves.