Pentagon treating military base freezer malfunctions as suspectedcyberattack: officials

The Pentagon is treating the spate of mysterious freezer ​malfunctions that spoiled food at military bases across the United States in August as a suspected hack, according to four officials familiar with the matter.One of the ‌officials said the military investigators were in touch with their French counterparts about a similar cyberattack on commercial freezers that disrupted supermarkets there earlier this month.Reuters was not able to ascertain how far along the Pentagon’s investigation was or whether it had reached any conclusions about what happened or who might be responsible.When asked about the investigation, the Pentagon said that a unit of Cyber Command — the military’s cyber force — was “working in close coordination with interagency and law ​enforcement partners.” It did not elaborate.The US Army Criminal Investigation Division said its Cyber Field Office was involved in the investigation and that it was working with French law enforcement ​to better understand “the refrigeration outages in Europe.”The late August malfunctions in the United States affected at least six commissaries — on-base stores where military personnel buy ⁠their food — according to a Reuters review of the military bases’ contemporaneous Facebook posts and website updates.In at least one of the cases, the freezers did not simply stop working; the cooling ​units’ temperatures were cranked up overnight, yielding mounds of wilted or melted food in the morning.The Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Facebook account explained on August 26 that its freezer “went into defrost mode where it heated ​up all the food.Trust us when we say it was ‘spoiled.'”The spate of rogue freezer behavior and the possibility of cybersabotage were first reported on August 28 by a recently created blog called Signal and Silence.The involvement of military investigators and their contacts with the French were reported by the newspaper Stars and Stripes and and Britain’s Daily...