U.S. Military Thinks Hackers Defrosted All Its Ice Cream

Military Thinks Hackers Defrosted All Its Ice Cream Four officials told Reuters they are investigating a suspected hack of military base commissary freezers. 29, 2026, pm ET Reading time 3 minutes COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER 29: U. Army trainees eat lunch in the field while going through basic training at Fort Jackson on September 29, 2022 in Columbia, South Carolina. Fort Jackson, the largest of the Army's four basic training facilities, trains 60 percent of the Army's new recruits. This past year, the Army has struggled to meet its recruiting goals, falling short by about 15,000 recruits or about 25 percent of its goal as it closed the fiscal year. © Scott Olson/ Read Later Read Later Comments (7) Pentagon officials suspect hackers went after the military’s commissary freezers, according to Reuters. Four officials said Defense Department investigators are treating a string of freezer malfunctions at military bases in August as a suspected hack, with one adding that investigators spoke to their French counterparts after hackers attacked supermarket freezers across France earlier this month. The Pentagon told Reuters in a statement that a unit of Cyber Command is “working in close ​coordination with interagency and law enforcement partners” on the issue, while Army criminal investigators confirmed they are collaborating with French police. The blog Signal and Silence was the first to raise suspicions about the issue in late August, writing that they were “self-aware enough to know this sounds insane,” but “there is a nonzero chance someone has hacked the commissary freezers.” That post identified 14 reported commissary/freezer outages at military installations in 11 states. (Reuters confirmed at least six.) Signal and Silence also noted that social media posts from Arizona’s U. Army Fort Huachuca had clarified there was no power outage, but that the freezer went into “defrost mode where it heated up all the food. Trust us when we say it was ‘spoiled.'” The Pentagon’s Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) imposes engineering specifications requiring defrost be “controlled through the RMCS [Remote Monitoring Control System],” and one procurement document shows RMCS is in place at 182 sites, including all 14 on the list. The blog also catalogued posts showing that commissaries at bases including New Mexico’s Holloman AFB, California’s Fort Irwin, and Rhode Island’s Naval Station Newport had all posted notices about refrigeration failures that kept chilled and frozen goods off shelves. Finally, Signal and Silence noted that in early August, Claroty Team82 security researchers had posted two studies identifying vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A and Copeland XWEB Pro freezer control systems, which are used to centrally manage commercial refrigeration.