What the Federal Refrigeration Hack Warning Means for Hotels

On November 5, CISA, the FBI, HHS, USDA and the Department of Transportation released a joint fact sheet warning that threat actors are targeting refrigeration controllers and electronic temperature controllers in grocery stores and cold storage facilities. According to the agencies, attackers can change settings remotely and force units into continuous heating and defrost cycles.

The warning follows several weeks of attacks across Europe. Since mid-October, hackers have tampered with thousands of remotely managed refrigeration systems at hundreds of grocery stores in France, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden. A second wave in early November spread to Germany, Romania and the U.K. In France, a refrigeration equipment provider's incident changed settings at three blood-product storage facilities. In the U.S., Pentagon investigators are treating refrigeration failures at grocery stores on military bases this past August as a cyberattack.

Although the fact sheet is aimed at grocery and cold storage, hotel operators should read it too: Walk-in coolers, banquet freezers, and bar refrigeration often run on networked controllers, and many are monitored remotely by vendors and sometimes installed with minimal input from IT.

The agencies also flag a risk they call "denial of view": if attackers blind the controller, a property that relies on that controller's alarms may not know anything is wrong until food has already spoiled.

Federal Recommendations for Operators:

• Find every connected refrigeration controller on property, including ones a vendor installed and manages.

• Take controllers off the public internet. If remote access is necessary, put it behind an updated firewall.

• Move controllers onto their own network, separate from guest Wi-Fi, POS and business systems.

• Change default passwords, and use multifactor authentication wherever the system supports it.

• Update firmware, and replace equipment that no longer gets security updates.

• Limit which devices and IP addresses can connect, and ask vendors exactly how they connect and who on their side has access.

• Keep offline backups of controller configurations.

• Set allowed temperature ranges and alert on any change outside them, ideally through an independent sensor that doesn't rely on the controller itself.

• Keep manual temperature logs as a backstop, and add a refrigeration failure scenario to the incident-response plan.

The Question Every Operator Must Ask

At some properties, refrigeration is overseen by the kitchen staff, temperature controllers belong to engineering, remote connections are installed by vendors, and the network is monitored by IT. At your property, who is responsible for making sure no one else can change the temperature in your walk-in refrigerator?