Household smart fridges and energy meters could be hacked by hostile states looking to cause “chaos”, cyber security experts have said.
Hackers sent temperatures soaring in supermarket freezers across 10 countries – including Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden – three weeks after an unprecedented cyber attack caused French freezers to heat to 50°C, spoiling millions of euros worth of food.
Older internet remote-control boxes that manage refrigeration were targeted with an automatic defrost function, triggering dozens of shops, including IKEA.
What to know as Republicans suffer brutal election losses
The Democrats have made sweeping gains in a bruising night for Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Sweeping victories
The US midterms have seen the Democrats flip key Republican Senate seats in places such as and .
The stunning results have been widely regarded as a consequence of the cost of living crisis which has been driven by the US-Israeli war with Iran. Losing both houses will now make it hard for Trump to drive his legislative agenda.
Key Republican losses in the Senate
Democrat James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton in Texas.
Democrat Sherrod Brown won in Ohio, defeating Republican Jon Husted.
Democrat Annie Andrews beat Trump’s hand-picked candidate Darline Graham to take the seat.
The losses keep coming
Democrat Troy Jackson won, taking the state’s Senate seat for the first time in 29 years.
Abdul El-Sayed is projected to win, becoming the first Muslim senator in US history.
Paralympian Josh Turek won a Senate seat in the state for the first time in 18 years.
Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate to win a majority, while in the 435-member House, they needed three. Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff, who won re-election in Georgia, told supporters “the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J Trump”.
Trump’s response:
I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!
Posting on his social media platform Truth Social, the President sought to defend the bruising results.
While offering to work with opponents, he also posted a picture of a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Veto”, suggesting he would block legislation they sought to take through Congress.
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Why you feel completely broke
A decent salary and watching what you spend is increasingly not enough for people to feel well off– here’s why.
Cost of living
The UK is suffering the worst decade in terms of the growth in household incomes since records began.
Due to cost of living pressures and a lack of substantial wage growth, leading think-tanks like the Resolution Foundation predict that a typical working-age household will see their disposable income fall by £1,050 or 3 per cent between now and 2029.
Disposable income growing slower
Slow growth, inflation and stubbornly high housing costs are the main culprits. While disposable incomes fluctuated throughout the 1970s and 80s, they generally rose again after a fall. Not so since the 2008 global financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.
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House prices rising faster
The average house price in the UK is currently around 6.5 times the average income, compared to around 3.5 times in 1996 and 2.5 times in 1966.
- One could argue that it is why Andy Burnham thinks Britain should rejoin the European Union and why we’ve heard so much about growth – now rebranded as “good growth” – in order to improve incomes.
More people paying higher rate income tax
One of the major reasons behind stagnated income growth is the constant freezing of tax thresholds – levels that won’t change until 2030.
You are now dragged into paying the higher tax rate of 40 per cent if you earn £50,271 or more. You stay in that bracket until you earn £125,000, but at £100,000 a year you lose your personal tax-free allowance and your entitlement to state-funded free childcare.
The NHS blood test which could find several cancers
Blood tests capable of detecting signs of several cancers from a single sample will be offered to NHS patients in a world-first trial.
New blood tests
Thousands of patients will be invited to take part in the Stride-RCT study, which aims to catch cancers at a time when treatment is more likely to succeed.
The tests – which use AI and other cutting-edge technology – could also help GPs identify patients with cancers that are difficult to diagnose.
How will the tests be rolled out?
Who is eligible?
More than 20,000 patients aged 45 or older will be invited to take part.
The tests will be offered to patients who present with symptoms such as persistent bloating or abdominal discomfort.
Where will they be available?
The £8.5m government-funded trial will be offered in more than 200 GPs across England.
How do the tests work?
The tests are designed to detect signs of cancers including bowel, pancreatic, ovarian, stomach, liver, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer.
Some work by identifying tiny fragments of DNA that are shed into the bloodstream by tumours. Others measure proteins in the blood, or use AI to analyse results.
The tests aim not only to identify possible cancer cells but also to indicate where in the body it may be developing.
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How autism diagnoses are ‘increasingly linked to ADHD’
Experts found a rapid rise in autism diagnoses among 16-to 20-year-olds since 2010 in the UK, as well as a rise in women and white people, compared to other ethnicities.
What were the findings?
Researchers from the Medical Research Council looked at data from the UK and Sweden.
They found that new diagnoses have increased from six people per 100,000 in 2010, to 64 per 100,000 in 2023.
Analysis also showed there has been a change in the make-up of people diagnosed with autism, with a decrease in those with a prior diagnosis of epilepsy.
Instead, they found an increase in the proportion of people who had a prior diagnosis of ADHD, stress-related disorders, eating disorders, headaches and chronic fatigue.
The story in numbers
58%
The proportion of autism diagnoses in people with anxiety more than doubled form 29 per cent to 58 per cent between 2010 and 2023.
- In the UK, 24.5 million adults contributed to the study, including 141,119 with an autism diagnosis.
- Writing in , the team said this could be the result of “greater appreciation of nuanced forms of autism that may have previously been labelled as other conditions due to overlapping features, particularly in females”.
How menopause is affecting women’s careers and pensions
Half of women in the perimenopause or menopause say their career has suffered as a result, with workers cutting their hours or feeling forced to turn down opportunities for career progression, according to a new survey.
Lack of support for symptoms
Nearly one in three said their life stage had influenced their retirement savings, according to the research for Scottish Widows. A similar number also said their regular finances had been affected.
And 50 per cent of women surveyed said they would like more support at work. 17 per cent said they had been forced to take time away to manage symptoms.
Breaking down the numbers
- One in eight (13 per cent) women had reduced their working hours and 10 per cent had turned down a promotion or career progression opportunity, for menopause-related reasons.
Scottish Widows found that a 50-year-old woman in full-time work taking a six-month unpaid break could potentially cost £1,300 in pension contributions.
Gaps in pension contributions will have a bigger impact over time, as savers will also miss out on the interest that could have been earned on them.
Two-thirds of women surveyed believe employers should be required to provide better support to women experiencing menopause symptoms, including financial support.
A blow to pension pots
Perimenopause or often coincides with what should be the peak earnings potential of a woman’s career. When symptoms force women to reduce their hours, step back from promotion opportunities or leave work entirely, the ripple effect on their pension pots is huge
Susan Hope, a retirement expert at Scottish Widows
The lessons Britain can learn from France’s pensions crisis
The i Paper takes a look at why the bill for pensions keeps rising on both sides of the Channel – and what can be done about it.
What’s the situation in France?
France will be unable to resolve its debt crisis without tackling sky-high pension bills, economists have warned.
It spends a massive 14 per cent of its GDP on pensions and the costs are rising every day.
Falling birth rates and rising life expectancy in France and the UK means pensions are mounting pressure on public finances.
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Why pension burdens are becoming unsustainable
- Economists have warned that unless France takes action to overhaul the pension system, it is unlikely to end its debt crisis.
- In the UK, public spending will be further strained next year, as state pensions are set to get a 3.5 per cent boost.
- Fraser Thorne, CEO of Edison, told The i Paper: “The UK’s… trajectory is more manageable. But more manageable isn’t the same as sustainable.”
UK advantages over France
Heidi Karjalainen, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says bigger private pension pots in the UK are making it easier to increase the state pension age, whereas “in France, it’s been really difficult to do that”.
It’s this cushion that will help the UK better navigate the trials and tribulations that come with an ageing population and falling birth rates, she says.
Giving people time to adjust
The French proposals were announced “without much notice”, Karjalainen noted, while the UK made the decision more than a decade ago.
Thorne says France offers a “pointed lesson in what can happen when governments try to reset the terms of the pension contract: five prime ministers in two years; mass street protests; and a reform ultimately diluted by political reality even when the economics were clear”.
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Security experts believe a state actor like Russia may be to blame for the attacks, which also affected fridges in a small number of British businesses.
While state-linked attackers are more likely to target supply chains or national infrastructure to cause maximum disruption, experts are now calling for homeowners to reconsider if they need appliances that connect to the internet and action from government.
A YouGov poll last year showed three per cent of Britons have smart fridges – the equivalent of more than two million people across the UK.
Labour MP Graeme Downie, chair of the Coalition on Secure Technology, said the attacks on supermarket fridges across the continent should make people in the UK consider the connected appliances in their homes.
“Millions of households now have fridges, freezers and other appliances that connect to the internet and receive software updates from their manufacturers,” he told The i Paper.
“One fridge failing is an inconvenience. But if hostile actors remotely interfered with large numbers of connected appliances at the same time, the combined effect could be chaos.”
Downie and others have warned of the use of cellular modules, a component used in smart devices that can connect to the internet or mobile network, from manufacturers that are subject to Chinese national security law.
These companies have to assist Beijing’s security authorities if asked to do so.
Downie said Government must improve safeguards on who controls components inside products, and the updates sent to them, following this week’s European cyber attacks.
“We do not yet know who was responsible, but the lesson for the UK is clear: everyday devices can now be remotely tampered by hostile actors,” he said.
“We need clear limits on high-risk technology in our critical infrastructure. We need to act now to protect us from the type of attacks seen across Europe this week, or potentially even worse, food supply havoc.”
Energy meters and smart TVs also ‘vulnerable’
Luke de Pulford, the co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which monitors the threat from Beijing, said any firmware in devices that requires remote software could be vulnerable to hacking from a foreign-based entity.
“Energy smart meters, microwaves, smart TVs – those are all things that are vulnerable. But also Chinese-made CCTV equipment. These are all devices that are well known to be vulnerable,” he said.
“Smart meters, if they are Chinese-made and have a Chinese cellular module in them, can certainly be used to gain really quite worrying degrees of control over energy flows within the United Kingdom, how they’re monitored, how that data is collected, but also the possibility of remote manipulation.”
This is mostly for “mass data gathering” to understand “how we use our energy and how they might be able to gain an advantage”.
Pulford added: “But in a worst-case scenario [is] the possibility of simply shutting off the flow, which smart meters can do.”
The YouGov poll last year showed smart meters are the most common wi-fi controlled household item, used by 39 per of Britons. This equates to 27 million people in the UK.
The next popular was smart voice-controlled speakers (35 per cent), home security cameras (18 per cent), thermostats (14 per cent), and smart light systems (12 per cent).
Household attacks less likely
While smart devices in the home could be hacked, experts said attacks are much less likley.
Professor Alan Woodward said domestic fridges in the UK would not be at risk from the attacks seen in Europe this week – which focused on specific control units used by commercial operators.
And attacking the limited number of smart fridges in UK households would also not cause enough disruption that state actors would consider it, he said.
“Nation states tend to be going after critical infrastructure – so power, gas, utilities, telecoms,” he added.
Jen Ellis, who works on the Government’s Cyber Advisory Board, said there had never been a mass cyber attack on domestic devices like fridges, washing machines or microwaves.
“I think the question I would ask is, where’s the really big bang? What’s the really big impact you’re creating? Because the average household probably doesn’t have that much stuff in their fridge and freezer,” she said.
“Any loss can be very impactful, but not impactful at the scale that we’re talking about to make it really feel like, aha! As a nation state, or even as a cyber criminal, this is going to be a really big payoff for me.”
What can be done to stop fridge hacks
Rupert Ashby, chief executive of the British Frozen Food Federation, said: “One question we all need to ask ourselves is whether everything needs to be connected to a network.
“Connectivity brings potential vulnerabilities, from conventional hackers to increasingly sophisticated AI-driven attacks. In the UK, we have kept a fantastic food supply chain moving for many decades without this equipment being connected to the internet.”
Downie called on government to “look at who controls the components inside these products and the updates sent to them”, adding: “Families must be able to trust the appliances in their homes.”
He added: “We need clear limits on high-risk technology in our critical infrastructure… We need to act now to protect us from the type of attacks seen across Europe this week or potentially even worse food supply havoc.”
In 2023, a report from a US-based consultancy group warned ministers that China could spy on millions of people in Britain through microchips planted in cars, domestic appliances or light bulbs.
Most microchips needed to connect devices like smart meters and electric cars to the internet are made by Chinese firms.
These microchips, known as cellular modules or CIMs, transmit and receive data remotely and are known as part of “the internet of things”. Downie warned in December that key household technology could be disabled by Beijing.