Weakness of police 'mega-force' idea as criminals of all kinds hit supermarkets: David Behrens

The standard sales pitch is that it will remind you when you’re out of milk – in which respect it does much the same job as a pen and a scrap of paper. But what happens when you’re low on dried pasta – are you supposed to maintain an online cupboard to warn you about that, too?

It was a discussion hardly anyone was having until recently because internet-enabled fridges were for the birds; enamelled embodiments of technology for technology’s sake.

But now it has emerged that supermarkets have been falling hook, line and sinker for the hard sell, wiring their freezers to online controllers rather than trusting their staff to set the knobs themselves.

It was only a matter of time before some enterprising hacker – perhaps the agent of a foreign state, maybe a wayward teen in his bedroom – seized the opportunity to intervene.

In the last few weeks the fridge lights have been going out all over Europe as criminals have taken control of banks of freezers and cranked the temperature from minus 18 to plus 50 degrees. The food therein, of course, has been ruined.

What’s that? You didn’t think it was possible for freezers to reach 50 degrees? Apparently that’s how they automatically defrost, for up to 20 minutes at a time.

In France, Belgium and at least nine other countries, though, they’ve been jammed on 50 all night long – and ours may be next. Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and the rest all use remote-controlled freezers and will now be metaphorically locking their lids to keep the fish fingers in and the hackers’ fingers away.

But what was the attraction in the first place of appliances that came with so much vulnerability built in?

The suppliers will tell you they’re cheaper to maintain because faults can be diagnosed centrally, with no need for technicians on the spot. But that’s true only up to a point. When a freezer goes wrong it’s always going to take someone with a screwdriver and box of spare parts to put it right. And if that someone has to come from further away it’s obviously going to slow things down.

The real lure, of course, is saving money. Store workers have to be paid at least the minimum wage to walk the aisles with clipboards and thermometers; automated dashboards at control centres do not.

It’s a misguided trend towards centralisation that is not unique to the food industry. Remote temperature controllers at France’s national blood service were also hacked last week, with attackers attempting to push medical fridges up to 110 degrees. They failed only because on-site alarms alerted the staff.

If that demonstrates anything it is the importance of keeping boots on the ground as a hedge against top-down control. It’s something the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police might want to keep in mind.

Sir Mark Rowley called last week for the 43 regional constabularies of England and Wales to be merged into eight to 10 urban ‘mega-forces’ which would do away with what he called the “bureaucratic, top-heavy spaghetti model” of the present network. In other words he wants to do to the police what Sainsbury’s does to its fish fingers.

He sees it as the solution to fighting exactly the kind of cybercrime that has manifested itself in the frozen food aisles. A team of specialists could operate centrally across national and county borders, he says.

He’s half right: country coppers used to chasing fly-tippers and livestock rustlers are perhaps not the best people to interrogate the computers at their local Tesco – but the reverse is also true. Victims of rural crime don’t want to deal with some city desk jockey who wouldn’t know a stile from a five-bar gate.

The point is that specialised units should augment local officers, not replace them. For while the nature of financial crime has changed, with cyber-crooks working from home like civil servants instead of picking pockets in the bus queue, smaller-scale antisocial offending is worse than ever. This is not the time to deprioritise it.

Ironically, no-one knows this better than supermarkets. They are feeling the squeeze from both ends of the criminal spectrum: sophisticated hackers twiddling the knobs on their freezers and light-fingered shoplifters stuffing joints of meat in their anoraks. The police will have to prove themselves agile enough to feel the collars of them all – and they won’t be able to do it remotely.