The Pentagon has confirmed a 'refrigeration disruption' at multiple U.S. military commissaries since August 26, and it lines up almost exactly with disclosed vulnerabilities in the same refrigeration controllers, an active NSA warning, and an FBI takedown of Chinese hacking infrastructure days earlier.
Read the full story: Military Commissary Freezers Failed at 14+ Bases. Was It a Hack? →
Transcript
Freezers at U.S. military commissaries started failing on August 26, and the Pentagon still hasn't said why. At least seven bases are officially confirmed, unofficial tallies put it near eighteen. At Fort Huachuca, every single freezer entered defrost mode at the same time, while the power stayed on. Here's why that matters. Three weeks earlier, on August 9th, security researchers at Claroty disclosed twenty three vulnerabilities in Copeland and Danfoss refrigeration controllers, the exact same equipment used in these stores, including a hidden authentication bypass. And on August 26th, the same day the outages began, the Justice Department seized two hacking platforms built by a Chinese contractor group, tools that had already hit NASA, the Federal Reserve, and the Senate. None of these three threads has been officially connected. But a disclosed vulnerability, an active nation-state campaign, and a takedown, all inside seventeen days, followed by unexplained freezer failures across more than a dozen bases, is a lot of coincidence to ask anyone to accept.