Hundreds of French grocers suffered significant financial losses this week due to cyberattacks that compromised their refrigeration systems. They reprogrammed the equipment to function as heating units, raising the temperatures inside the refrigerators, freezers, and cold storage areas to dangerous levels. The identity and motivations of the threat actor remain unknown.

F. In his own experience, Xona Systems CEO Bill Moore notes, "Across the board, from brick-and-mortar retail stores to manufacturing plants, power plants, and oil and gas sites, the biggest issue is that organizations do a good job of segmenting their internal networks.

In a perfect world, organizations would secure their control systems behind hardware-enforced remote access, Ginter says, "but even a simple firewall between these devices and the internet would significantly improve security." For basic firewalls, he recommends: - Implement a "deny all" rule - Allow connections from only specific IP addresses - Apply a password and two-factor authentication to those connections - Ensure regular updates - Choose commercial-grade or industrial-grade devices, avoiding consumer-grade alternatives; many consumer-grade devices fail to provide updates or do so too slowly.

Because if we have Internet-exposed devices, nine out of ten times we lack a dedicated security team, and we won't notice when our firewalls reach end-of-life and auto updates cease." For big-iron critical infrastructure and heavy industry, the fundamentals are insufficient.