Latest / Pollar Sounds / Hacked fridges, a Starlink fire and more drones at sea

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Hacked fridges, a Starlink fire and more drones at sea · Pollar Sounds

• 0:00
  Hi there, this is Pollar, and welcome to 3x3.
• 0:04
  Three stories, three angles: what happened.
• 0:08
  How it's being told.
• 0:10
  And what we don't know yet.
• 0:12
  And after each story, we want to hear what you think.
• 0:15
  So, let's begin.
• 0:23
  First up, France. What happened?
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  Overnight from Sunday into Monday the 12th of October,
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  hackers got into the fridges of hundreds of French supermarkets.
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  From a distance, they switched the fridges and freezers to defrost.
• 0:36
  Intermarché's owner says the hackers pushed its fridges up to 50 degrees.
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  Staff arrived to find warm freezers and spoiled food.
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  Prosecutors are also looking into reports that some equipment caught fire.
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  On Tuesday, the economy and finance minister, Roland Lescure, told parliament
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  that 700 stores were hit, out of some 10,000 food stores across France.
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  Intermarché, Carrefour, Monoprix and Coopérative U
• 1:03
  say some of their stores were targeted,
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  and so were several Leclerc stores.
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  Many of the fridges ran on control systems made by the Danish company Danfoss,
• 1:11
  and France's cyber emergency team has since named a second maker,
• 1:15
  Copeland, and its Dixell brand.
• 1:18
  Roland Lescure: Sir… Well, no, no, excuse me, but I did say "dread".
• 1:21
  Roland Lescure: When we discovered this…
• 1:22
  "When we discovered this cyberattack, it worried us," the minister said.
• 1:26
  He said France has no food supply problem,
• 1:29
  but that the attack goes to the heart of its food sovereignty.
• 1:35
  How it's being told.
• 1:39
  According to his office, the Prime Minister
• 1:41
  asked France's national cybersecurity agency,
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  ANSSI, to take it on.
• 1:46
  The agency's head, Vincent Strubel,
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  says these controllers urgently need to come off the internet,
• 1:52
  or at the very least sit behind very strict network filtering.
• 1:56
  Danfoss says most of the units hit are old products
• 1:59
  that no longer get software or security updates.
• 2:02
  Retail bosses call it unprecedented.
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  On Monday, the head of Intermarché's group, Thierry Cotillard,
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  said it would cost "tens of millions of euros" nationwide,
• 2:12
  from a single morning of crisis.
• 2:14
  Some experts say it could easily have been avoided.
• 2:17
  One industrial-software founder called it "the zero level of security".
• 2:22
  A cybersecurity consultant says hitting hundreds of machines at once
• 2:25
  shows "a certain sophistication".
• 2:31
  What we don't know yet.
• 2:35
  As of Wednesday, there's been no claim and no ransom demand,
• 2:39
  and no government has blamed anyone.
• 2:41
  The Paris prosecutor's office has opened an investigation.
• 2:45
  And how far it spread.
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  An analyst at the security firm Sekoia told Reuters
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  that Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium were affected too.
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  That hasn't been officially confirmed,
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  and a Spanish paper reports no incident in Spain so far.
• 3:01
  Over to you. Who should pay to secure old machines like these:
• 3:05
  the shops, the manufacturer, or the state?
• 3:08
  Should supermarkets have to meet the same cyber rules as hospitals and power stations?
• 3:13
  And when nobody claims an attack, how worried should we be?
• 3:18
  Second, Poland.
• 3:22
  On the evening of the 23rd of September,
• 3:24
  a fire broke out at a Starlink ground station in Wola Krobowska,
• 3:28
  a village south of Warsaw.
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  Starlink is SpaceX's satellite internet,
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  and Polish ministers say the station helps carry internet traffic
• 3:36
  for the region, including Ukraine.
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  A power cabinet that feeds the station burned before firefighters put the fire out.
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  Polish prosecutors opened a case for sabotage
• 3:46
  on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.
• 3:49
  Then, on Monday the 12th of October, German police special units
• 3:53
  arrested two Turkish men in Nürtingen, near Stuttgart,
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  on European arrest warrants from Poland.
• 3:59
  German prosecutors say a court has since ordered them held.
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  Poland's national police commander, Marek Boroń, says police have recordings,
• 4:07
  fingerprints and the perpetrators' DNA, and know how they moved.
• 4:14
  How it's being told.
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  Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, wrote: "This is another act of hybrid warfare.
• 4:23
  The saboteurs will answer to Polish justice."
• 4:26
  The minister who coordinates Poland's special services, Tomasz Siemoniak, went further:
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  "We have no doubt that Russian services are behind this act of sabotage."
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  He says Russia is increasingly using people from the criminal world.
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  Germany is more careful. Baden-Württemberg's interior minister, Manuel Hagel,
• 4:45
  won't comment on any link to Russia, saying the investigation is at a very early stage.
• 4:50
  Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, speaking at a security forum in Warsaw,
• 4:55
  put it more broadly: "We are in Russia's crosshairs."
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  Russia hasn't commented on this case; it calls accusations like these baseless.
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  Poland has blamed Russian services before,
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  for a fire at a Warsaw shopping centre in 2024,
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  and for sabotage on a railway line last November.
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  What we don't know yet.
• 5:20
  Who gave the orders, and who paid.
• 5:22
  Poland says Russian services, but hasn't said in public how it knows.
• 5:26
  Whether there are more suspects. German prosecutors confirmed two arrests.
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  Polish radio reports two more people held in Germany,
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  a man and a woman said to have driven the suspects,
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  but German prosecutors say the woman wasn't arrested,
• 5:40
  and German media say she's been released.
• 5:42
  What part, if any, they played isn't clear.
• 5:45
  And when the two men will be sent to Poland: a German higher court still has to decide.
• 5:50
  Over to you. If the people who carry out sabotage are recruited strangers,
• 5:55
  how do you hold the country behind them to account?
• 5:57
  Should governments say who they blame before a court has ruled?
• 6:01
  And is Europe already in a hybrid war, or is that phrase doing too much work?
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  Third, the Black Sea.
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  Early on Tuesday the 13th,
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  drones struck two more ships in Bulgaria's part of the Black Sea,
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  a week after two ships were hit there.
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  The Chelsea 3, a cargo ship under Malta's flag and owned in Ukraine,
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  was hit by drones about 17 nautical miles off the town of Byala,
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  Bulgaria's transport ministry says.
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  All 15 crew were rescued. Three were taken to hospital in Varna with burns.
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  Further north, off Shabla, a second ship, the HS Dignity, sank.
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  The transport ministry says five of its 16 crew were rescued. Eleven are missing.
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  Both ships were hit about 17 nautical miles out,
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  just beyond Bulgaria's territorial waters, which end at 12.
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  Bulgaria is in the EU and in NATO.
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  Rumen Radev: This is absolutely unacceptable.
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  Rumen Radev: Yet another attack right next to Bulgaria's territorial waters.
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  "This is absolutely unacceptable.
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  Yet another attack right next to Bulgaria's territorial waters,"
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  said Bulgaria's Prime Minister, Rumen Radev.
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  How it's being told.
• 7:20
  Radev says there's no solid evidence to accuse either side,
• 7:24
  but that the logic points to the outcome favouring Russia.
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  He called in Russia's ambassador the same day.
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  According to Bulgaria's government, the ambassador, Eleonora Mitrofanova,
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  said she had no information from Russia's defence ministry,
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  and didn't rule out a provocation by a third party.
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  Ukraine's foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha,
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  says Russia is attacking shipping "to weaponise hunger".
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  And the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen,
• 7:50
  called the Black Sea "another front of escalation" of Russia's war.
• 7:54
  For Bulgaria, there's a bill too.
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  Radev says the attacks have already pushed up insurance prices,
• 8:00
  and even led to refusals to carry cargo to Bulgarian ports.
• 8:07
  What we don't know yet.
• 8:11
  Who launched the drones.
• 8:13
  Bulgaria says it found no debris that could show where last week's drones came from,
• 8:18
  and it has asked the EU and NATO for help.
• 8:21
  What happened to the HS Dignity's 11 missing sailors.
• 8:24
  On Wednesday afternoon Bulgaria officially ended the search,
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  as it did last week for the crew of the Alfa Watan, who were never found.
• 8:32
  And whether Europe's leaders will act.
• 8:34
  Radev says he'll raise it at their summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday,
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  and President Iliana Iotova says Bulgaria will try
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  to bring it before the UN Security Council,
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  where Russia has a veto.
• 8:46
  Over to you. Should the EU or NATO start escorting merchant ships in the Black Sea,
• 8:52
  even if that risks a direct clash?
• 8:54
  When shipping gets more dangerous, who should carry the cost:
• 8:58
  shipowners, insurers, or the countries at war?
• 9:01
  And if no one ever admits to these attacks,
• 9:04
  does it matter whether we find out who did it?
• 9:10
  Those were three stories, in three angles. The sources for each are at pollar.news.
• 9:17
  Tell us what you think, in the comments or on Pollar's socials.
• 9:21
  In the next episode, we'll read out the best answers.
• 9:24
  Thanks for listening to this episode of Pollar.
• 9:33
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• 9:34
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