The French Blood Establishment (EFS) said late on Tuesday that temperature and defrost limits were raised to extremely high levels on Monday. This happened at three sites that store plasma, the liquid part of blood. The attack hit a refrigeration equipment supplier at those sites, the EFS said. Monitoring systems caught the change fast, and staff acted. The EFS said no blood products or samples were harmed.
SecurityWeek named the supplier as Coolworld. Coolworld said the flaw sits in another maker's component, outside its control, and only a limited number of units were affected. Le Canard Enchaîné, which first reported the attack, said it tried to push temperatures from minus 30 C to as high as 110 C. The EFS did not say how its monitoring is built. No attacker has been named. France's cyber agency and the Health Ministry are investigating.
Interpretation: 110 C is far outside any safe range for a plasma freezer. A hard limit built into the hardware or firmware (the device's own code) should reject such a value from anyone. Whether or not independent monitoring was involved here, cold-chain safety should rest on controls the controller cannot override. Buyers can ask suppliers who may change setpoints remotely, which limits the device refuses, and whether alarms use separate sensors.