Hackers Heat French Supermarket Fridges; Brie Calls It Best Night of Its Life

PARIS, France — Hackers who remotely cranked the refrigerators at hundreds of French supermarkets to 122 degrees Fahrenheit overnight have been formally thanked by the nation’s brie, which says it reached full ripeness in six hours instead of six weeks.

“For the first time in my life, I was understood,” said a wheel of brie de Meaux at a Carrefour outside Lyon, moments before an employee in oven mitts threw it into a dumpster. “They called it a cyberattack. I call it a spa.”

Paris prosecutors described the attack as “large-scale,” affecting connected fridges at Carrefour, Monoprix and Intermarché locations. Intermarché said about 150 of its stores sat at 50 degrees Celsius for six hours, which a spokesperson for the invented French Federation of Affineurs, Gaspard Fromagerie-Lunette, called “the most efficient cave-aging program in the history of the Republic.”

Industry experts say the incident exposes the core weakness of a smart refrigerator: it is a refrigerator that takes instructions from strangers. “We added Wi-Fi so the fridge could email a manager when it got warm,” said retail-tech consultant Odile Thermostat-Vasseur. “It did. Several hundred times. In Russian, possibly.”

Shoppers were less impressed. Retired schoolteacher Margaux Pellicule, 71, of Annecy, said she arrived for yogurt and found it had become “a warm opinion.” Store managers have since installed a backup cooling system consisting of a teenager with a bag of ice and no password.

The fridge software supplier has promised “full transparency” and a security update, which will be delivered to every affected unit over the internet.