Evidently, the username was admin and the password was automatically reset to the current date, every day. More of a gross negligence issue than a hack, IMO.
Well, from my understanding, the write-up by the security company posted in the sub-tweet explain that it's not only the current date, it's just a weak algorithm that only uses the current date as seed, and only that.
And this mechanism is complementary to regular auth, so admin password was _something_ but the bypass allowed you (if you reverse engineered the algorithm) to login without knowing it.
So that's still a firmware issue indeed for me, no admin set voluntarly its password to current date.
This may be a joke, but it's notable that the EU has the Cyber Resilience Act, which makes producing devices with this kind of lack of security illegal. Broadly speaking it takes effect from December 2027.
I work in embedded security. CRA and RED are game changers. We can argue this is years late but at least EU is giving security requirements teeth. Very expensive teeth.
ofc it's /s, spoiling millions € of food by hacking into fridges of course il illegal. My guess is rendering the braindead auth / bug exploit illegal wouldn't change anything (besides legitimate uses)
IIRC, DMCA does not cover authentication bypass for administration of hardware. It covers circumvention of security measures expressly designed to deter access to copyrighted material, which means it would only apply in the case that the attackers used the exploit to access protected copyrighted material. It's unclear how that would apply to controlling a freezer's setpoint.
This is one of those cases where saying "Europe should..." is valid, because they do have the concept of European law which if passed has to become law in all member states as well.
ISO 27001 means they have processes in place that proof that risks are monitored and continuous improvements are being made. ISO 27001 means they have policies, and can show those policies to the auditor.
Never assume that having that certification means that shit is actually secure. It just means the company can do the audit dance.
Technically, this wording also implies that they ensure that there's always ample supply of imperfections so that they can never run out of improvements to be made ;)
NEVER run out of improvements to be made. Rule number one of getting audited.
Always leave an obvious-once-you-see-it, but minor, defect somewhere for the auditor to latch on to. One they can earmark for you to come up with a plan to address the issue before they grant you the certificate (and which you'll be able to write up in no time because you planned for it).
A good auditor and a company actually taking this stuff seriously can benefit from 27001. That probably accounts for 5% of all 27001 certifications out there.
If you're lucky you get an auditor who's just there along for the ride towards early retirement in a few years, and who'll joke with you and eat your lunch. Had one of those once. Doesn't help your security one bit of course, but it makes audit time more relaxed.
The real mistake was to connect such food critical equipment to the internet. I don't know who dared to do that, this has been part of the common knowledge for a while now.
You still can do it, but it better be a super low level private network: basically a super low VPN/crypto without using any off-the-self kludge, open source or not, probably directly implemented in some hardware driver in assembly for machine code/hardware control (if traffic was "big", it would have been FPGAs, probably). And you ** _MUST_ ** have a permanent and significantly sized and competent "security" team 24/24 7/7 ** you can trust ** for monitoring and looking for "pertinent" flaws.
Mechanically, the effort required is some exponential of the machine code (compilers are a [trust] problem, not a solution) size, complexity and code unstability (change over time).
No, trusted compilers of comfy computer languages do not exist by definition, eat the bullet.
Related to crypto: I wish we had some open source binary specifications implemented in various ISAs for some micro-architectures. You want machine code here, not even C or whatever (or at best only for those binary specifications).
And don't be a fool, ASIC trust will be a thing: some features will have to be disabled, or you better be ready to change some micro-architecture, yes, would be better to have several micro-architectures based on the same ISA (i.e. RISC-V for zero IP lock) ready at proper scale.
This is on the top 10 list of funny things I've seen all my life. How can anyone take that company seriously for anything ever again? If this is what we happen to know about, what other shit is going on there?
This is pretty interesting as the Danfoss vulnerability was suspected to be related to a similar situation that occurred across US military bases in late August 2026.
immediately thought of this article as well. really interesting. I could imagine someone using options/futures or other obscure financial instruments to make some money off this. hard to think of other motivations
I think Russia is doing random stuff of the kind, my understanding is it’s just about sawing general chaos, not doing a strong action that would be discussed at a diplomatic level.
Well, yes and no. It increases the pressure on people in power. More pressure, more mistakes.
In this case the question is, if US Army freezers were hacked earlier, why did nobody brief other operators of cooling equipment. Its a failure at the top! Everyone is getting flustered and knives are out.
But maybe they could not fix the underlying software or whatever and were not ready to share details without opening themselves up to more attacks. Also there are a lot of attacks happening all the time, which ones do you share?
If the psychological pressure at the top increases, more mistakes will be made. Sometimes mistakes can be subtle over or under reactions, sometimes the mistake is not to do anything. It is real effort to evaluate an appropriate response. For example, the military could reach out to commercial operators quicker, but then they have to handle all the comms, questions, and they also potentially leak more attack vectors. The commercials also start having this overhead of having to read emails from the military and internally those orgs have to deal with that overhead in comms to evaluate the seriousness.
This is a problem, because very few orgs have spare capacity for this stuff and so they have a choice. They can react to the military comms and risk mistakes somewhere else due to comms / management bottlenecks, or vice versa. There are only bad choices. And every time this happens, another choice has to be made.
Lots of these will be low-level attacks with manageable impact, which lowers the alertness over time, until that moment when something serious happens. If at point everyone is exhausted a real costly mistake will happen. Its the long game.
In this case, I am sure a consideration was that the attack was already used against high-profile cases and it makes sense to just use the attack vector more broadly before it gets closed.
If a fix existed, then why didn't Danfoss have a fix?
I agree that they had a firmware update, but unless they had the operational capacity to update the checks notes freezers of all their customers, that is not a fix. The theoretical and technological aspects of solving a problem are often the easy parts.
It's like if NASA would claim to have a fix for the Opportunity rover on mars to get it operational again. All they need to do is to replace the batteries. Well, that is not a fix if there is no way to actually replace the batteries in practice.
I don't see why the existence of a firmware update would remove the culpability of negligence from the hardware manufacturer.
You seem surprised that a nation who invaded Ukraine unprovoked and has regularly gone out of their way to target civilians and has been found guilty of violating the Geneva Convention would carry out exactly the kind of hybrid warfare they have a reputation for. Curious.
> Not surprised they would hack systems, surprised they would spend their efforts on shit like this that doesn't have any real impact
Okay, let me explain why this is wrong. This will be an imperfect example, but hopefully it gets the point across.
When you shut down the refrigerators and freezers of something like 700 stores, people notice. They go to get food that day, and there is nothing fresh. Nothing. Go to the next store, still no fresh or frozen food.
Was there a natural disaster? No. Was there an attack? Yes, but the attacker is unknown. But who was in charge? Who was supposed to prevent this? They remember.
It's getting colder outside in the North, fall is here. This is traditionally a time where a lot of people were, for thousands and thousands of years, stocking up food and doing final harvests to survive the long winter.
If suddenly hundreds of stores don't have fresh food across the country, that is a large impact. Not even just what happened, but what could happen. If it happened to these hundreds of stores, what about thousands? What about other types of stores? What about other types of attacks? And your brain starts thinking about the other possible type of things that might be able to be fucked with remotely. The fear sets in. People that are afraid make less rational decisions. Maybe they also decide the current people in political power aren't fit for task, because they can't keep them safe. Maybe this didn't happen under the other guys.
Meanwhile, millions of dollars of food was just wasted. Not only that, but it also has to be disposed of. Because it's such a large amount of food, it will take additional trips from the trash disposal service. They may even bring people in on overtime across the country. The people at the stores themselves will probably work extra hours, quickly trying to rotate the bad food out and hopefully (now if not soon) get the new food in. In addition, the food logistics network has to get additional shipments of food it wasn't expecting to transport to hundreds of stores. That's a lot of extra time on the road, a lot of extra wear on equipment. It also stresses the food supply and production itself.
So I don't know what "doesn't have any real impact" looks like to you, but to summarize, this is going to do millions of dollars of economic and political damage, and contributes to social upheaval. It probably cost next to nothing to actually attack.
France has presidential elections coming up next year, and growing civil unrest is happening. Cyber attacks are routine, and several have been officially attributed to Russia.
Anything that can trigger fear can elicit irrational reactions. That has been a known propaganda tool since forever.
> Every society is three meals away from revolution.
Purpose could also be to show “look what we can do” and citizens will think they are more powerful than they are and think “what’s stopping them from causing a nuclear meltdown or releasing all the water in a water resovari”?
Remember lots of Russian tactics is pretending they can do a lot of bad stuff if people don’t do what they want. “Stop helping Ukraine or we will nuke you”.
Also USA has been pinning every single cyber attack on Russia/Iran/NK/China for several years, and I am personally very doubtful that western countries do not run ransomwares. In any case the result is that everyone thinks those countries do have the capability to do this.
Possibly, but I bet most of their nuclear stockpile hasn't been kept maintained and it wouldn't surprise me if parts of it had been stolen to be sold. This is why Putin threatens a nuclear attack, but doesn't do it as there's a good chance it would show how many duds they have (also setting off nukes would likely force a response from other countries).
This feels exactly what Russia has been doing for a couple of years. Not saying they did it this time, I have no idea. But it would be very much in character.
Yes. The political payoff can be cumulative: repeated disruption makes everyday life feel less reliable and institutions look less capable.
There are - in addition to that - examples of Russian financing and influence operations alongside this. Take for example France’s Front National that received a €9.4 million loan from the First Czech Russian Bank in 2014. Separately, the US DOJ’s 2024 Doppelganger case alleged a Kremlin-directed operation using fake news sites and social-media accounts to influence elections and weaken support for Ukraine.
Those are different mechanisms, but they illustrate why the damage from an influence campaign cannot be measured solely in immediate economic losses. My concern is the feedback loop: disruption creates grievances, propaganda amplifies them, and political actors can turn those grievances into support.
That does not establish who was behind this particular refrigerator attack. Attribution still needs evidence. But “the direct damage was small” is not enough to conclude that an operation has no strategic value.
So agree with you. Just more shit flooding the zone.
Btw. there is also a separate interesting stream if one asks the question about wealthy technology investors’ attitudes toward democratic constraints.
Like Peter Thiel explicitly wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
My concern is that concentrated private power and foreign interference can both weaken democratic accountability, even when their motives differ. The results are a win for both by weakening democracy.
They used drones to block airports across Europe (I ended with overnight stay after they attacked Eindhoven) - this one has no direct proof, but it was obviously Russia.
"Russia has never hatched, is not hatching and will never hatch any plans to attack anyone," he stressed. "Russia is a peaceful country, which is interested in good relations with its neighbors." -- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
---------
that is just recent, if you look for older then say Beria is case where accurate depiction would be criticized as not realistic and ridiculous
I’m not sure it’s them. But I just watched a video saying that the whole diesel thing is just a troll, it will neither solve the US nor Russia’s problem (the deal is way too small for both sides) but sow discord between the US and Europe for Putin and be a pre-election performance for Trump.
Yes, it's reportedly between 0.9-3 days of USA consumption of diesel ... but it does give Russia dollars to exchange for weapons.
Recall Trump's regime refused at one point to sell weapons to Ukraine.
Continually undermining the leader of a country who's defence prevents Putin's expansion and further war in Europe ... it's not 'discord' it's absolute treachery.
Russia's idea of hybrid warfare means doing things like dragging anchors across internet cables and paying people to firebomb warehouses and businesses.
Looks like that specific vulnerability was found this summer, disclosed in coordination with the vendor and at least some models were patched [0] (unclear if all models were), but from early reports:
- they either didn't warn their customers this was a critical security patch,
- many of these fridges/freezers were directly accessible on the internet with their own 3G/4F SIM cards without further protection!
> Researchers at cyber security company Claroty released a report[1] in August stating that they had “identified multiple vulnerabilities” in Danfoss’s systems that manage its refrigeration equipment. They added that Danfoss fixed the vulnerabilities in a firmware update once they had been made aware.
The manuf Danfoss released a patch on 2026-08-01 here[2]. To be clear, I cannot evaluate FT/Claroty's claim that the vulnerability used in this cyberattack was fixed in the Danfoss patch.
I have no idea how complex or difficult it is to flash the hardware on these refrigerators, but they had 10+ weeks to do it. This feels like a missed opportunity.
Are there any HN readers here that work in IT for any big supermarkets in France? Did you own this kit or similar, and what is the regular firmware update cycle/process?
Confusing title, both the original and the one here on HN.
Three french supermarket chains had their refrigeration systems hacked.
Separately, a super market chain serving Belgium and the Netherlands shut down a large chunk of their IT systems due to a "cybersecurity incident", primarily affecting distribution centers and grocery delivery services. But the supermarkets are currently open, and do not have refrigeration issues.
Suspicious timing and these incident could well be related, but that has not been reported so far.
It could well be one ransomware attack on Ahold Delhaize, and an unrelated attack on a refrigeration supplier. Note that a similar refrigeration attack happened happened to a number of US military installations a few weeks ago.
I worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.
These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage. One example might be that due to shifting customer patterns and products, you might want a certain refrigerator case to be kept colder with a narrower temperature range. Another example is for Demand Response: when a brownout may occur, the utility companies want people to lower their load, which, in the case of supermarkets, means turning off lights, increasing the thermostat on the AC, turning off dehumidifiers, etc.
One notable story from that time: this was during the 2008 economic crash, and the company went from hiring to laying off within a week. A group of technicians were working on a refrigerator compressor system and were told by security to stop what they were doing and immediately exit the building. They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
There's huge difference between _sensors_ and _actuators_. You can put sensors online if you don't care too much about data leaking out. You put _actuators_ online... You need to be able to deal with the consequences.
How does this actually work, in practice? If you have read access to sensors, then there's a non-air-gapped network between the control systems and the internet.
If your network isn't air gapped, then it's vulnerable, and attackers will side step the "read only" path to affect control system changes.
It's being called a data diode (diodes usually allows current in one direction only).
It can be implemented with a fiber optics cable with only the transmitter on the secure side, a laser+photo cell for real air gap, cutting the rx cable in a rs232 or having a microcontroller with an output pin connected to another controllers input pin. By handling it with hardware instead of software you get a very secure partition between the trusted and untrusted side.
It's used to monitor for example industrial systems and power plants.
Yes, this is exactly the kind of approach I'm referring to when I say it's possible (though not trivial to implement), but it still doesn't prevent attacks. Air France 447 crashed with extraordinary loss of life because the pilots responded incorrectly to reported sensor readings. Any scenario where authorised staff are able to affect changes in a control system is vulnerable. The attack vectors just change to suit the target system.
AF447 wasn't a security breach. You're talking about an entire separate class of human-machine interaction problem that has little relevance to the lack of security around access to OT operational surfaces.
Not OP, but the point seemed clearly to be that if sensor input is wrong, then it can result in catastrophic results even when all control systems are normative. The inference then is if hackers can affect sensor readings then they can still effectively control a system - like putting an ice cube on a non-adjustable thermostat.
If hackers can "affect sensor readings" before they feed into the control system, sure. But that is not read only access to the sensor... The trivially simple example is a webcam streaming the thermostat output. The hacker can watch that stream all day - it's not gonna cause any issues with the refrigerator. Even if the hacker had control of the stream, worst they could do is disrupt any monitoring system that uses the stream (e.g. make it appear that there is a fake issue or mask a real one) - but that is significantly lower risk than having remote access to trigger a semipermanent defrost cycle that spoils all the food.
The most straightforward way to make a fridge with monitoring over Ethernet is to slap on a Pi that reads off of the microcontroller managing the temperature onto an existing product. Most microcontrollers don't support raw memory access or reprogramming through regular interface, so faked values on the Web UI won't do much harm.
The most straightforward way to make a fridge with control over Ethernet is to slap on a 5-10 years old industrial temperature control product and wire up sensors and actuators onto it. In such cases, the industrial system that would be now 25 years by now would be running some cumulative 35 years old RTOS and Claude is going to find out it has bunch of basic buffer overflows that can make the fridge explode if exploited.
Sure, but think through the details. There are ways to expose telemetry through an otherwise air gapped system, but it is actually not easy to implement correctly.
My position is that if there's any connection, of any practical type, between the control system and the outside world, an attacker will be able to find ways to break things.
Even if it just boils down to "an attacker made our dashboards report numbers wrong and so we closed a valve to prevent an issue that didn't exist, and inadvertently destroyed our own product", the outcome is the same.
I don’t think the technical implementation is the barrier.
I would be much more worried about the human element of technology development. Namely that having a web based interface which shows data, but can’t change anything would feel unnatural. I can totaly imagine that you make the choice, implement it correctly. you have your website only showing things but unable to make changes.
A day later a product person asks for the ability to set the temperature on the web interface. You kindly and patiently explain to them that due to safety reasons you can’t implement that feature. They will understand and nod.
A month later one of the execs asks for a similar feature. They might also present the feature as mission critical, or even package it in the language of safety. After all customer X just lost so much money because we couldn’t do this one simple thing via the web interface. You argue with them and your viewpoint eventually wins. But it is a bit hard to argue because you ultimately have to argue that you / your team cannot be trusted to implement the feature safely. So you have to make it sound like you are both competent enough to be trusted with this hard decision and incompetent at making things secure enough the same time. A hard sell. But you win somehow.
Then a month later there is a hackathon. And one of the new hires puts together this amazingly looking new product UI. Everyone is amazed it is genuenly a delight to use. But it completely ignores the data diode principles. You have to kick it into the long grass, or modify it so much that it is barelly recognisable.
Then a month later a new product development start. Your company is hoping to conquer some new vertical, and need to make a cheaper version of the product. So an electrical engineer is tasked to cost optimise the control unit. They correctly point it out that we could reduce the BOM cost by more than half if only we got rid of the data diode and the second set of microcontroller. You have to argue the safety case. People nod. But you are loosing more and more “political capital”. Upper management asks you to work with the EE on how you can maintain the safety while also cutting cost. You know that this won’t be easy and the savings won’t be as much.
And so on and so on. So even if the company implements such data diode, and implements it correctly and safely. Future product and business pressures will work against it. Realistically you are not going to win every single argument about it. One day you will come back from a holiday and there will be someone who circumvented it either because they didn’t know better, or didn’t believe that they cannot be trusted to make the circumvention safe enough. It is a people problem, not a tech problem. If there is even such a distinction.
A firewall which allows to send sensor metrics from in internal network to an external collector and block everything else will go a long way. Not an air gap but much batter than whatever French supermarkets had in place.
Sure, but as stated in reply to a sibling comment, you then just hack the read-only system to mis-report sensor state and interfere with operations that way instead. Or use one of a million other approaches. Attacks won't follow your rules.
I think this comes down to the implementation of a particular system. But in general, since control system (the one that controls things through actuators) is NOT online, one can't interfere with it through online channels. They can interfere with sensors and fake readings reported online for example, probably, but not the ones used by the control system as it's offline.
Indeed, I agree that it's better to have the control systems separate from the telemetry systems and that absolutely does prevent certain types of attack. It's dangerous to think that prevents all types of attack, however.
Some devices are sensors, like temperature sensors. It's not that they're "read only", it's that... You can't override temperature. For that, you need other devices. Like a switch to a motor that operates refrigeration compressor. That would be an actuator. If you put the data from the sensor online, the worst case scenario is someone unauthorized gets your data. If you build interface to control an actuator online... You can read the article up top.
The problem is that all major cloud providers (AWS and Azure for sure, and I'm sure Google as well) have a large number of services targeting IoT devices, both to read and control. So default architectural decision is "We'll just plug these into AWS IoT, it's secure, reliable, highly available, and has all the features we need, all we have to do is to configure what we want and we're all set". Which in reality is not that secure just because of how IoT is designed. But AWS/Azure obviously push for these solutions because it gives them more revenue.
Wanting (not needing!) the refrigerators to be remotely controllable/observable does not require exposing them directly on the public internet. VPNs are a thing and mobile networks support this in normal business SIMs without any device-side requirements.
Right...but putting everything behind the great firewall doesn't solve the true problem. Which is these devices are shipping with garbage and no accountability. We'll break into your moat if that's what it truly takes, is my point.
Supermarkets very efficiently drive down the cost of food so that food is abundant - basically everyone in developed counties has access to low cost food. Part of that process is not wasting overhead on having people manually checking various gauges.
It’s a very low margin business if you don’t work efficiently you’ll get outcompeted by people who do like Aldi/ Trader Joe’s etc
Comparing Control automation of boring systems running all the time to robots is really funny to me. Those systems weren't previously run by humans before the more electronic approach, the control mechanism was physical in nature but less adjustable.
Most of the HVAC based control system changes are about saving energy, not labor.
Grocery is very low-margin, and if a new system can save $500 on electricity and maintenance per year per store, and you've got 1000 stores, the technology justifies its cost very quickly.
Often attacks like this involve first getting on the VPN (leaked creds, a n-day on a web-accessible endpoint, etc) then running wild on the internal services that everyone assumes are safe.
It probably is. It's not some web api. These things are usually designed for someone to use a remote desktop type system and/or VPN to access a LAN only web app running on a windows 2008 VM on a 10 year old tower server running VMware 6 in the utility room. Maybe these days there is a cloud portal they can access that has metrics and stuff. I see no indication in the article that this some exposed web app/API webpage.
> They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
Of course not. The security team was likely blamed, or the techs doing the test. All of the grunt labor should be ready for stupid management decisions on a moments notice and plan accordingly.
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because [reasons]
I understand why it's beneficial to have these systems connected to a network. You have not explained why that network has to be the Internet, and TFA is one reason why it shouldn't be.
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.
Also unless managers in grocery store chains means something else than in any other corporation, I somehow doubt it's managers who monitor or "take action" on remotely-controlled fridges.
Some supermarkets in the US (and maybe other places, but can’t speak on those) give department-level managers control over the fridge temps in their department, as well as task them with routine monitoring. From my experience, they do generally have remote assess for both reading current temps and adjusting them, since decisions on where to put certain product (with various temperature requirements) are often made on the fly.
We all know the saying: The S in IoT stands for secure.
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around €7,000 [1]. So this is hardly the typical dirt-cheap IoT device you can buy for a few bucks from China. The product label also says "Made in Denmark."
This vulnerability certainly appears more complex to exploit than the ones routinely found in cheap IoT devices.
Still, I wonder why, in the age of Tailscale and Nebula, a large company like Danfoss doesn’t use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
That label only means most of the final assembly process have been completed in Denmark, it doesn't mean all HW & firmware inside of it have been developed in Denmark by vikings.
A lot of HW & FW by EU companies whose main specialty isn't HW and FW, tends to be outsourced to third party consultancies (sometimes even offshored), who won the bid to do it as cheap as possible, so you never know what quality you're gonna get inside of it, despite the provenance label.
One of the biggest scams right now is the Made in Germany label on cars/household appliances, which isn't in any way an indicator of quality like it used to be.
I promise I'm not simping for Danfoss, just because I'm danish, but... Is it really their fault the customers aren't putting these things behind VPN? Yes, the thing should be secure ideally, but why take the risk?
Agreed, it's not necessarily Danfoss's fault. The customer bought the appliance and is free to do whatever they want with it, that's what ownership is about and I fully support this.
But in a situation like this, who bears responsibility? The customer whose appliance is exposed to the internet, likely having been installed by an authorized technician in the first place, or Danfoss, whose now-insecure maintenance interface listens on 0.0.0.0? I don't have an answer.
As others have pointed out, this interface is intended for use by service personnel.
My point is simply that situations like this can be prevented in several ways: on the customers side, if they have a capable IT department, or on the vendors side, by designing with the expectation that some customers will inevitably expose devices to the internet, regardless of what the manuals and training materials say.
This is a great find, would be nice for it to be mentioned in the original article. It all worked out just like the title says. I guess someone didn't upgrade their firmware in time.
The security advisory linked in that article was published in August 2025. Apparently it took about a year to finish the writeup. Unless the supermarket also spent about a year without upgrading the firmware, it might be a newer vulnerability.
Thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't noticed that. I'd expect a large customer to be persuaded by Danfoss to upgrade within a year, especially before publishing the details of the vulnerability, so you're probably right.
It seems that some of the newer lab machines require internet access because you can't run lab tests unless you have a paid subscription to use the machine. No credits on the subscription, no tests.
I mention this b/c a lot of commenters here are saying "but why would you ever hook up a freezer to the internet??"
I find that type of comment fascinating as many of the people on HN worked for firms that built the technology required to use internet based subscription models.
That's the glass half empty view. I prefer the glass half full view that the future is going to be an exciting continuation of the endless and universal arms race between attackers and defenders. Life would be boring if there was no conflict.
Viewing the glass now requires a subscription and permanent internet access in case you try to view the glass without having an active license. For more details, check this gargantuan EULA that you had to sign to open the box where the glass came in. It also says that you owe us money for asking this question.
I expect a more likely outcome will be that all systems move to an offline-dumb model by default because it will be cheaper and more reliable to pay a contractor that comes in occasionally to flip some dials than it is to deal with contractors that are constantly losing an ever-present arms-race.
A lot of hospital and lab equipment has worked like this for a long time. Often done with “credits” on a mag card, smart card, usb, or something downloaded. I definitely recall seeing floppy disks in use for it way back…
This is because, in some cases, the machine is actually rented or leased and the maintenance and supply costs are charged based on usage rather than as capex. Maintaining these machines is not cheap, especially calibration and testing.
Aw, so caring of them to introduce a subscription model to help the hospitals, and for a reduction in income. The only true saints left in the tech sector.
The leased + remote diagnostics model is widespread across pretty much every sector that uses equipment which needs specialist maintenance. Even things like jet engines are moving from manual data uploads to two-way networked comms.
> many of the people on HN worked for firms that built the technology required to use internet based subscription models
And I hope we all start calling these people out more for what they've done. I've worked in tech a long time but I would never contribute to something like this.
Those machines require certified consumables to operate, as well as regular calibration and maintenance anyway. Labs have to follow quality assurance procedures. It's not just some random piece of equipment you can yolo.
We did this at a local makerspace on an old medical laser for tattoo removal (we wanted to use it for non medical purposes). It was pretty trivial, the credits mechanism was as low tech as you might expect :) it used a mifare classic card in a slot and simply deducted credits from a counter until 0.
Subscription can make sense for some cases. There is no reason to try to push it everywhere except that some people mindset is so deeply altered by greed that whenever they see a nail they see an opportunity for creating a hammer subscription fee managed by some transitional holding which will be "fiscally optimized."
I can see how a subscription model would be appealing if it was in lieu of outright buying expensive equipment. Operating expenses for some machines are cheap but the machines are expensive enough that the tests themselves are expensive to pay off the machine.
Of course, the reality is more likely that the hospital still has to buy things and the subscription is a net loss on top of that so patients (or the people paying for the care) are screwed twice.
Or the equipment is otherwise expensive up-front to a small clinic. Ophthalmology, for example. The subscription feature is cheaper than becoming a financier.
I don’t think I have ever even once been in a product design session where the stated reason for going with a subscription model was, “So the customer can pay us less money.”
Of course the customer is going to pay more in the long term.
Even if the TCO for the clinic were exactly the same over X number of years, the manufacturer that sells subscriptions still comes out ahead because they're effectively in the financing business, too. Why tell a customer to go borrow money from somebody else when you can make them borrow from you?
Arguably the customer gains the option of not paying, which has some value. Whether that option value is close to the extra they pay through the subscription is left as an exercise for the reader.
Getting a loan from a bank would be cheaper than subscription pricing.
There are two reasons to use subscription pricing:
1) Price discrimination: You want to charge a large customer more for the same device
2) Lowering the capital expenditure by hiding the true price in operating costs
You could argue that (1) is good for small clinics, because they get access to the same machines as big clinics for a smaller cost. But I believe it's just a way to remove opportunities for competitors and results in everyone paying higher prices, even smaller clinics.
There’s even more hospitals and clinics who have a radiology department but no Radiologist onsite to read the exams. It’s all sent offsite to remote Radiologists sometimes 100+ miles away.
Disrupt the internet and good luck getting your emergent studies read by doctors who don’t look at anything to do with the scans and X-rays they order other than the Radiologists report.
a) USB sticks are a vector for infection too you know
b) Inserting a clumsy sneakernet step into a time critical life or death decision might be a bad idea.
> Connecting your case controller to the internet offers further opportunities to generate savings. If you can diagnose issues and control the case remotely, service engineers needn’t be called out to simple situations like starting a defrost. And being able to compare performance and efficiency across an entire estate of stores makes it easy to spot patterns and make incremental efficiency gains. (https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/articles/dcs/...)
I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".
People underestimate just how much effort goes into minimizing food waste and shortages in these types of industrial systems. The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
Connectivity in these environments is often challenging, it isn't like connecting a consumer fridge to wifi. Sometimes you are bridging weird networks that multiple parties need access to. It should be secure but that isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Many of these systems have very long lives, so there are many limitations that reflect the technology that existed when they were built.
All of this is invisible to the average person but it is what makes the world work.
It looks more like they set a target level for shortages and then try to minimize waste without exceeding that level. Almost every time I go to Safeway, they have run out of some items I intended to buy. Trader Joe's is more reliable, probably because they have fewer items in stock.
> The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
I think the entire supply chain is making sure it has maximum profits extractable by law and any other emergent phenomena you observe is serendipitous and probably temporary, damaged or dropped as soon as the regulatory environment or marketplace changes to allow another dime of profit.
And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.
Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
Grocery stores infamously have some of the lowest margins in all of retail and typically hover in the 1-3% range. As a sector they have about zero room for inefficiency and have to be this aggressive about chasing operating cost reductions.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
Well, for whatever it's worth, I think the closest manufacturing facility for those would be in Iowa. They had a plant in California but it closed in 2015.
AKA, the decade where everyone bought way too much into the 'Just do JIT supply chain for the manufacturing location to warehouse tail and pretend we are Amazon' bullshit.
I put it that way because it is short-sighted to not consider that transportation costs will always increase over time (i.e. fuel prices, wages of drivers) and shipping a final product over that long of a distance (i.e. at least half of the country, and instead of shipping grain to process it is finished boxes which is less efficient for volume) and yet they made that choice.
Where it got nasty is that when the average consumer base decided it was fine to pay dealer markups on cars because of the parts issues that industry saw from their JIT shortsights, everyone saw dollar signs instead of a problem to fix.
Wonder the max price a company would be charged to ship a trailer of the largest boxes of Cheerios from say Maine to San Diego. Maybe fifty cents a box? You got me curious about the breakdown of the $9.
Seems like these days stores just keep it on the shelves instead of throwing it away. The produce quality in even the more expensive stores here is abysmal.
I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.
That's the work that goes into hiding the "other half" of the inflation (i.e. the 2x diff between reported inflation and what you can actually see in your life).
Except that in this case, the possibility of something like this probably is worth it, because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems, while ignoring the ability to improve system efficiency is a static stance. A lot of things have driven up the price of groceries since that time. You mention "comparable or lower inflation adjusted prices", but this hides the fact that the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation (105% vs a baseline of 94%), while the input costs to that supply chain (like labor, and diesel) have gone up faster. The efficiency isn't doing nothing, grocery prices would almost definitely be higher without it.
That's why I spoke of them in the plural. Obviously the possibility of a system hack (presumably) won't ever completely go away, but individual vulnerabilities as they appear in specific systems are usually tractable problems, especially if you narrow it to things that one wants solved rather than all possible vulnerabilities regardless of severity or accessibility.
That's not what "vulnerabilities are solvable problems" means, except maybe for cybersecurity maximalists who believe that, "bro, add passkeys, and just one more thing, attestation, and W^X, and ..., and there will never be vulnerabilities".
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
How would you stay in business if your competitor was offering 20% off your prices because they had better logistics and tracking? Ask consumers to eat the cost due to their latent demand for, uh, inefficient delivery and food spoilage?
Are you saying that stores in the 2000s were throwing away 20% more of their total revenue than they are today? That sounds crazy, especially given that the prices - again - seem pretty much the same or higher if you correct for inflation.
But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.
Choose your own number, but it has to be large enough that supermarkets decided the CapEx was worth it, and also large enough that once one did it, the rest followed suit.
It's not even significant cost. The main cost is still the hardware, not electronics driving it, and especially not a tiny module that talks with electronics to send/receive commands/metrics
This is already the case in the grocery market. There are various leaner and more efficient operators offering the same goods for lower prices, sometimes a lot lower than just 20%. However most people don't think to shop at the various Grocery Outlet's or Food4Less's. Working class is wise to it but not really further up the class ladder. They don't think much at all and reflexively go to their ralphs, which plays the opposite game where they have higher prices such that they might occasionally mark them lower and make you think you are getting a deal. Some people are even going to erewhon.
No, this “user story” does not mean the customer actually wants or uses the feature. You do not need remote command and control to tell if your truck chiller is working.
You don't need remote command and control to tell you if your single truck chiller is working, you can just go look at the thermostat. But a company needs it to confirm that the chillers are working and at a safe temperature across all 1,000 trucks in their fleet.
Along with remote monitoring comes automatic remediation. "Your reefer is set to 40F degrees, but your cargo manifest says that you're hauling frozen chicken, we set it to 0F."
Or "Your reefer is set to 35 degrees but you're hauling chilled beer, we set it to 40 degrees to save fuel"
But you’re going to adopt a platform that meets the needs across your enterprise, so the capability is often there even if one situation may only call for monitoring.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
Yeah, and people sewed clothes per hand for hundreds of years until someone automated it with a machine.
You need to save labor somewhere to free it up for other jobs that give you technological progress. If everyone would still be occupied plowing fields with oxen, we wouldn’t have cars and computers now.
And you know what the customer needs? Or is this just a personal feeling. There’s multiple people from the industry chiming in on these threads as to why this is needed.
What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
There’s a whole massive industry out there of companies looking to make 2% efficiency savings on everything, and VCs looking for this. The glossy presentation might have even said 2FA somewhere so yes it’s definitely safe.
The perspective of resiliency and how much will you lose if things go wrong seems kinda… new?
Funny that it should happen in France which has been at the forefront of European self resilience.
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
> I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
I went through a manual you mentioned in another comment. It listed "High level of security against undesired user
access" as one of the features but it wasn't expanded upon. So I did more searching and found cybersecurity best practices from Danfoss.
They highlight connection through a firewall, mention secure remote access methods, monitoring for data breaches, strong access controls, etc. Reasonable, but these are just recommendations, so the stores could have followed all of them or none at all.
> we searched publicly available internet-wide scanning platforms, including Shodan and Censys, for signatures associated with its management interface. It didn't take long to find what we were looking for. Numerous controllers [2765] were directly accessible from the public Internet.
I get that having networked devices is a very nice to have feature. However, putting them directly to the open internet is bewildering. Any person worth their salt in IT would know that's a bad idea. Were these people never brought into the conversation? Do they connect to the store's WiFi so that IT isn't actually needed to install once the WiFi creds are obtained?
I imagine a very conscientious vendor could easily set up a system that detects if the device is trivially exposed to the internet, causing warning messages and beeps and general pestering.
... And then the customer demands it be turned off, and the customer is always right...
IIoT (Industrial IoT) doesn't have time to deal with the load of bullcrap that cybersecurity is. Half of it is not even about security, but setting up moats and keeping control over users, which is very much not what you want to prioritize when setting up industrial infrastructure, and is rightfully rejected by engineers working there, who are concerned with safety and reliability first and foremost.
Though I'm afraid things are getting worse, or at least it looked so a few years ago, back when I worked in this space. The hot thing in IIoT / Industry 4.0 was basically taking all webshit technologies and deploying them on industrial hardware, to "leverage mature innovation and OSS ecosystem" or such nonsense. The problem (one of many) being, once the engineers were done trimming excessive security measures that negatively impacted safety, they were still left with node.js running on industrial controllers, now even less secure in general than it was originally.
Did you know that buildings have doors that cannot be locked to prevent them from being opened from inside, because otherwise in case of a fire (or in the US, active shooter), people will die if they cannot exit the building?
Did you know that many industrial plants intentionally disable certificate revocation checks, because having a certificate expire on you for whatever reason is a sure-fire way to break the plant (and in some case possibly kill people), and overall a nuisance when trying to keep the plant running, while the threat it protects against can be handled elsewhere in the stack?
Security and safety are very often at odds - not just in emergency, but during regular operations.
Yes, there is little demand for this sort of thing when the potential loss, should it even come, is already insured. Your customer might actually not be users themselves but their insurance companies. It may be a better model to say pitch to them and then have them offer discounts to their clients who are using your tech that mitigates whatever % risk. Someone pitched that car probe to Progressive after all.
The people who should be held liable never will be. Their money is like an impenetrable shield to any sort of accountability. They'll just scapegoat the guy that warned them about the risk repeatedly for not doing more to prevent it.
I have been in meetings were the Data Security Officer refused to sign off on specific projects, without having a proper pentesting report in place, for example.
Because legally it would be their responsibility, if something would happen.
I wonder if, following the US army story in August, someone might have bet on a prediction market “Danfoss refrigeration systems will defrost after suffering an already-disclosed vulnerability”.
Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming out for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
Because in some ticket tracking system, some customer with the most tickets was nearly always calling for a tech to physically start a defrost. Maybe solving that accounts for 2% of support overhead. It’s best to lose that customer. Second best is telling them defrost is remotely-triggered, and then not doing it. Third best is actually triggering it.
Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle makes sense. Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle to run for so long that it wastes products does not.
Seems like two totally different issues. One is cost and one is efficiency gains.
For the latter I would imagine you could have a short (maybe a month) logging period where you connect the fridges and collect data and then comeup with some offline system to manage them generally for better efficiency. You could even have a test group or single fridge that you keep connected to the internet for future data points (like in case of a giant heatwave or something)
We all keep a shotgun next to the printer in case it makes an unexpected noise here because the average HN reader knows a fridge manufacturer knows nothing about infosec and the lowest-bid contractor they farm the connection does the minimum to check the boxes. So yeah, we've been rightfully complaining about why does my icemaker need an internet connection for years.
Lets combine some testy topics: will LLMs make this any better? On the one hand, if it's easy for fridge manufacturers to churn out code, will the slop create enough cracks in the icemaker to sail the titanic through? Or will the lower barrier to pretty good security agents get more security into the IoT field (assuming it's taken advantage of?) Or will it not matter because the store manager will just set the web portal password to 123456?
The combination will be based on the proposition that AI must consume all and nothing shall get in its way (even if it AI), whilst maintaining the existing devotion to capitalism above all:
- Cheapest possible test-passing AI generated code with minimal check-box style security audit.
- Looser and broader definitions and greater penalties for hacking.
I thought about it and considered those "considerations" to be worthless.
> how it affects customer purchase decisions.
If nobody wastes energy in a stupid way like this, what changes? Are they no longer buying cold things? So what, then you sell more of the stuff that doesn't need refrigeration.
If there were two identical supermarkets, and one had running taps, and the other turned off their taps after using them, and paid their employes 5cents more a month, I would shop in the second one. But I can't, I don't get the choice, because a bunch of bunch of marketing people convinced someone to get an "edge" over the competition, and then told everybody else they have to, too, or they'll FaLL BeHiND. Kick those grifters to the curb and you'll save even more.
That could be done by the servicemen or managers on-site. There is no reason at all to have remote control fridges. All this really does is make some higher up feel more importantl because they have a centralised controller, while providing very little real benefit.
Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.
The benefit is the same as making websites remote controllable. A person then doesn't have to drive in to flip a switch, which means fewer people are needed to operate more systems, saving the company money.
Switch to do what? If food is in it you can't change anything. If food isn't in it then why is it running or why wasn't it defrosted when it was emptied?
If you home refrigerator could be defrosted remotely, in what scenario would you ever do that?
Stores are now installing e-ink price tags to save labor updating price labels. They're not going to turn back from centralized HVAC/fridge monitoring and control.
No they are doing it so that they can change prices more quickly and thereby extract more profit. Next (or already current) step is adjusting prices dynamically based on nearby customers.
Unlike fridge remote control (note, not remote monitoring but remote control) e-ink price tags actually make a good deal of sense. The prices are already managed centrally so it reduces the labor to needing to accurately document which piece of hardware is at which shelf location as opposed to needing to manually check that each tag has the up to date price. (TBF OCR is now good enough and mobile SoCs now powerful enough that you could probably automate most of the traditional task but that wasn't historically the case.)
Our company makes IIoT gateway devices that log parameters from the system and push them to a read-only location. I've personally reverse engineered a dozen or so management protocols to get the data out because pretty much no vendor supports pushing temperature data to a centralized place. Those that have monitoring cloud software only support their own devices.
Every now and then our customers ask if we can add remote control for specific parameters but we've always turned them down, citing liability reasons.
Re: legacy Danfoss systems such as AKM, 720 and 850 there is no way to have read-only access (for different reasons in each case). I haven't been able to find weaknesses in the new 800A yet, but that's only because I have not had to try yet.
This sounds like someone (or someone's AI agent) saw the CVE and did a one-off drive-by attack instead of systematically targeting refrigreration systems and trying to find vulnerabilities.
The article is dated August 2026. Synacktiv (a different company) reported the very same vulnerability for older system managers/controllers already in 2023. Their report[1] says Danfoss told the products are EOL and should be upgraded. At no point did Danfoss fix the same issue in 800A. Typical.
Back in 2016 when we were integrating their 850 series system managers we encountered an issue with the HTTP API returning 400 series errors over slow links. We sent them PoC code written in Python 3. One month later they sent us an email, complaining that they first had to backport the PoC code to Python 2.7 as that was the newest version they could install. They also attached a "fixed" PoC code snipped where they had removed the artificial delays that did not trigger the issue. Danfoss never did anything to actively fix the issue.
One year later I browsed changelogs for the commercial RTOS that Danfoss used and realized the issue was fixed upstream in 2010 or 2011. That means their AK-SM 850 had at least six years worth of unfixed bugs.
In the recent heat wave being able to remotely tell which systems are about to fail helped quite a bit because you could take parts of the freezers offline to save the rest. There is no technician permanently on site at any of large retailer stores, you have mobile teams.
Interestingly, a major Dutch supermarket was also hit by a yet-undescribed cyberattack, prompting them to basically shut down every IT system. So not a hack of a control system, sounds more like an ordinary ransomware attack... but still tantalizing that two EU countries have their food supplies targeted the same day... the day of a big NATO "russia we dont mess around" conference, too.
Lack of duty of care is the crime you have here. The "pics or it didn't happen" phrase needs to be modified to "criminal charges or it didn't matter". You don't walk around with cash sticking out of your pocket, you don't leave your car keys in the ignition when parked on the street, and you don't leave critical infra unprotected online.
If you believe some of the emerging comments out there - try "Danfoss CVE" - you'll see that some of the suspects are 15-20 year old controllers like the Danfoss SM800 (EOS 2021) and SC355 (EOS 2016).
Why don't they just--- no margin.
But there were CVEs-- no margin.
The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class has nothing in terms of luxuries like security reviews and gear replaced on cycles and other basics taken for granted.
But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
Secure-by-default laws will eventually help, but there's always going to be groaning infrastructure particularly in commodity industries, and we still haven't onboarded most of the disaffected men to the Internet that will commit innumerable more hacks and disruptions.
> The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class ...
I think it's more than this. Industrial control system upgrades are serious business and (at least if you're doing them properly) require a lot of planning and consideration. Particularly when the subsystem being replaced is decades old already.
I think the overwhelming majority of people (including on hn) have no understanding of how complex industrial systems are - even as-built, but particularly after decades of evolution. Doing proper engineering in these spaces is expensive.
You can reasonably blame supermarket chains for being insecure, but we certainly aren't currently enabling them (or anybody else) when it comes to fixing these issues.
Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
In before "but insurance"; yes insurance can in theory mitigate some of this, but I feel like people on HN have no understanding what it's like to deal with a multi-million dollar insurance claim that the insurance company 100% does not want to pay out. The legal battles over such things take years and are on their own incredibly expensive.
The thing is that many IoT devices aren't simply updated. The industry doesn't work like software development countries.
They usually think in projects. Some project manager, some funds and some workers are assigned to a specific project. And than this project is followed through. Eventually the project is done (finished or dismissed). And all the allocation shifts to the next project.
This is e.g. the reason why most of the Android phones have so bad security. Even Qualcomm does the Android stuff on their chips only project wise. Is the project done, then you'll get an Linux kernel from 2021 with this specific device. There will never be an update, even if this outdated Linux kernel has 20 known CVEs. The reason is simple: no PM allocated, no funds allocated, no workers allocated.
And such project-thinking also exists for other hardware chips, e.g. network or WIFI chips. Lots of development to get the thing "ready to market" --- which isn't necessarily to get it good --- and then almost nothing.
And this is the hardware the industry automation uses. Except that there some intermediaries in between, e.g. Kontron that make industry-grade boards. But even at that level you have the project structure. These boards are then used by the manufacturers of the industry automation which, who would have thought it, also mostly think in projects.
And this is the reason why the S in IoT stands for security.
People at various levels would need to switch to a process mode, away from project mode. And people at various management levels need find a way on how to sustain this financially.
> Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
It happened once. Did you do the maths here? Can you tell us which one was Kore expensive and what percentage chance there was of this hack happening?
Someone did the math. Cost of continual maintenance, versus cost of product loss. They determined it wasnt worth the maintenance cost, and accepted that risk. And that risk manifested.
This happens all the time. Unfortunately, in my experience, most of the risk acceptance happens without even really believing in the cost of the risk, and people just accept everything. it is highly likely someone like that accepted this.
The problem with security maximalist[0] ideology is that it does not accept reality for what it is: shit will happen. The correct way to handle risks is to mitigate them to some extent, and then insure (or self-insure) against the risk that remains[1].
Then, when the risk actually materializes and mitigations prove insufficient, you write off the damage and carry on with your day - and yes, perhaps even reward the executives who set up mitigations and insurance that allowed the business operations to continue undisturbed.
Only then, mitigations MAY be upgraded and insurance premiums adjusted, as an event happening is an important new evidence in risk estimate for it happening again.
That's how adults in the room handle security.
It's only the general public and cybersecurity people who see random events happening and decry that somehow it affects them and Somebody Needs To Be Accountable, and Someone Must Do Something About It.
--
[0] - Or should I say, cybersecurity maximalist, because in every other field except software, this is well understood.
[1] - Talking about regular security, that applies to 99.99%+ of businesses; the risk to life and limb is a special case with extra considerations, though it fundamentally doesn't change much about the framework.
It's psychology. One option is a guaranteed upgrade bill that's due right now. The other one is a speculative what–if that may never happen.
And that's even assuming anyone who runs these sorts of systems have "hacked to turn on defrost mode" on their bingo cards at all, which probably isn't the case.
On top of that, upgrades carry risks of their own!
It was „what–if that may never happen” before agentic AI.
Nowadays you can be pretty certain it will be exploited.
It is not just run faster than slowest guy to get away from the bear, now it is dozens of bears per runner and bears are stupid enough to chew on anything but also smart enough once they bite something tasty that works will just continue biting that.
I think it's fair that the price up until now has been mostly zero. On the other hand you can 10+ years of examples on HN of people saying these types of threats with IoT devices and internet connected industrial hardware are not theoretical and it's shocking they weren't being exploited more often.
The thing I can‘t wrap my head around: why does a freezer need internet access at all? My freezer at home works just fine without. I bought it 20 years ago. Worst case in the supermarket: a freezer dies on Saturday night, you throw away the goods on Monday morning and call someone capable to fix it. Lowest TCO solution.
My random guess: freezer need temperature audits and franchise supermarkets have to prove they're properly managing the food. If the central monitoring service can also alert/dispatch staff within minutes to deal with issues, it becomes a pretty attractive proposition.
Something that might not be obvious, but temporary dips in temperatures also need to be monitored as it's enough to spoil the food. Worse case scenario isn't to have to throw 50~100 kilos of food, it's to have spoiled food still looking fine and consumers ending at the ER, with the whole franchise name on the news.
> My freezer at home
That can't be your frame of reference for a business entity part of a franchise.
this is sad. its like tragedy of the commons. you could have lived in a village without thieves and you dont need a lock. but as soon as there is one thieves, everyone in the village now need to have locks. you could have all your servers without security in a village with social trust but the moment you have evil actor everyone must now have security expenses that do not add functionality just to fight that single pathogen.
so the expensea are related not to amount of adversaries but to amount of things you need to protect. because its enough to have one bad guy to inpose expenses on whole village.
That is a dangerous game, especially when affecting food supply. Widespread cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are deemed grounds for nuclear response in most national doctrines. This obviously is way out of scale, but concerted widespread efforts by decentralized groups could end up triggering ww3 by accident. Not when they try to play a game of chess, but when they shut down a water treatment plant, and some other unrelated group shuts down gas pumps, and suddenly there are millions of people with no fresh water and no fuel to get it to them...
In my recent experience (last 3 months) with a cyber claim getting insurance to pay out was actually pretty straightforward. It was about a $250K USD loss on a phishing attempt (someone hijacked and rerouted payment details for a wire)
> I think the overwhelming majority of people (including on hn) have no understanding of how complex industrial systems are - even as-built, but particularly after decades of evolution
I may not have experience, but it is standard security practices that monitoring and control must live in separate channels for security. This is not a "planning and consideration" concern, this is conceptual design of systems.
Apparently the freezers needed to coordinate defrosting. Evens out grid load or whatever. Making everything Internet controllable is one way to achieve that.
A supermarket may have 30 freezers. You don't want them to beep loudly if someone forgot to close the door. Instead you connect them to a central monitor. A local employee can see on the monitor which freezer has a problem and go see the issue.
The monitoring is as well a proof that the cold chain was kept.
This network was local to the market. Then one day it was found better to collect these data to a modern dashboard, and so the local network ends on corporate network.
> You don't want them to beep loudly if someone forgot to close the door.
Why not? It works as an alarm, is simple in design and requires no external input.
They need to be checked 3x per day anyway for temperature so someone will notice eventually. And checking temperature must be product core temp so no remote monitoring. Unless haccp changed massively over the last 20 years to "we don't care anymore".
This is remote management, not just monitoring. Say you want your fridges to integrate with weather predictions, or prepare for a change of stock in a specific freezer across 100 sites.
Features are appealing, but hopefully LLMs can make these cowboys finally secure implementations that they have never been forced to before.
How do you measure core temperature of, say, a block of frozen fish without destroying the packaging and contaminating the good? Do they throw it away after measurements?
But you don't need to replace entire system to massively reduce surface area for the attack. Just do what was done for decades, and put the vulnerable devices between VPN and/or additional authorisation layer.
It's far less work than touching anything on controller side (at most changing some network settings) and requires attacker to at the very least penetrate your network perimeter and snoop around to find it rather than "run nmap on a controller's default port over country's IP range"
An enterprise grade VPN is pretty damn safe. A government could probably get in but then a government probably isn't going to bother hacking your fridges to defrost.
This slowness also means it sometimes has a hard time understand new risks and a lot of industrial systems are not operated by people who understand those risks and do…very stupid things.
Sorry, it was a busy day. I was agreeing with everyone else here. The move fast and break things attitude is one we can't afford when building control systems for critical infrastructure. I used to work in big tech, and if I pushed an update that didn't work or wasn't tested properly, the worst thing that could happen was we revert the change and there's a minor inconvenience to a user. If Facebook goes down for an hour, the company loses money, some advertisers get mad, and their users get frustrated. If an industrial Siemens SCADA operation goes down for an hour, the best case is the operation (be it a factory, airport, wastewater plant, etc.) shuts down for an hour. The worst case is people get sick or die.
It sounds dramatic but every update or change to the system rocks the boat and exposes it to a whole new tranche of dangers. So we spend most of our time observing. There's no such thing as a casual QoL update in SCADA.
I think for the big players, it often is, my impression is the more systemic risk is smaller players (like very local utilities) these are sometimes run by very unserious people.
Most SCADA systems date from the 1970s and a lot of them don’t really think about network security or even have a concept of it. So, they don’t think about the consequences of connecting it to the Internet for remote access. It’s just a feature they want.
Plus the lifecycle on these systems may be decades not weeks. At some point it needs to be segmented physically (more cost).
In 2017 I was hired at a place to support their ERP system and regular SysAdmin work. My first month was the last patch for their 10 year old ERP system. That was key software running the entire company and it was deployed before I finished middle school. The floor was run of scanners using WinME terminals that lost config on power loss.
That business is still profitable. I did not stay long.
As the IT Director at an independent grocer that's currently overhauling it's HVAC system (super fun for me to see Danfoss in the news this way) let me assure you that no one working in this space day-to-day has much of a clue wtf they're doing. When I inherited our systems, all the controllers were statics set within the subnet's DHCP lease pool which was shared with the office network at the time because, and I quote, previous IT guy thought VLANs were scary. Every couple of weeks a new DHCP lease would be assigned that would overlap with a microcontroller's static and kick the communications to something like the main AC governor off the network.
The guys deploying the new system ($2 million for a single location) are having HVAC schlubs terminate CAT5E and leave the gateway controller just hanging, unmounted to the wall or anything. Lo and behold, the RJ45 port has been broken and you have to send me a new gateway.
All the replacement controllers (for a system that is supposed to be better than Danfoss) are being set to 192.168.0.x. Each individual device, based on the "technician" descriptions are running individual DHCP servers inside them. And they just deploy them, no asking IT about approval or correct network config, just deploy and then make it our problem on a random day when they realize nothing is talking to each other.
They are just now in the late 2020s realizing what a VPS with an API is - truly, nothing to worry about with baby's first public IP address when baby doesn't understand what the implications of multiple DHCP servers on a single network might be.
The people "designing" and deploying these systems are HVAC guys with a little bit of software and networking knowledge. The networking (and security lmao) are the lowest priority part of what they're doing, they're more concerned with crimping pipe and moving onto the next project.
The people doing the project management and buying decisions are likely not IT at most operations, but the Facilities guys, and they'll slap a microcontroller anywhere until IT catches them or tells them they can't do what they want as easily as they'd like. There are no security reviews before deployment because the people heading the project don't even know what security is if it isn't petty theft and they don't want to hear that it will take longer than the contractor is promising them.
For additional context here, given everyone talking about the tightness of margins in retail grocery, until 6 months ago our network backbone switches in an environment where we need true on=prem servers to run operations, were still 10/100 Cisco Catalyst 2000s. Previous generations had fucked up the networking so hard with such little documentation and wacky misunderstandings that it took me several years to unfuck bits and pieces slowly and then schedule an actual maintenance window (because those mean potential lost sales, can't do that!) to cutover the rest to a more reasonable series of 1Gbps switches. We do mid 8 figures in a single location and I had to go through an entire song and dance to get budget approval for scheduling the 4 hours of OT for my sysadmin to do a maintenance window with me at midnight. Granted, we post mid 5 figures in actual net income most years, so yeah, margins are incredibly tight for smaller players and those of us actually trying to do a good job in any of the different sectors of the business are constantly trying to fix messes that wouldn't exist if there'd been better understanding or honesty about the long term costs of short term savings.
In any case, I'm sure there are more business segments out there like grocery HVAC where the networking is a simple means-to-an-end and the people deploying these networks barely understand the depths of the waters they're swimming in. There is absolutely a need to coordinate all the constituent subsystems to keep inventory stable until it sells, but yeah, if I'd even have been in the room during decision time with the contractors I'd have shot down any plan with external access without very precise deployment specs and plans. But I wasn't, I'm just the guy finding out some just certified HVAC chucklefuck is deploying DHCP bombs on my network 4 months into their contract and thinking they're doing me a favor. Without a doubt, a sufficiently informed and motivated attacker could knock out many SMBs that don't have a suitably knowledgeable IT department or god forbid an MSP charging them extortion rates for little real value.
Really love that I'm finding out our current HVAC system is getting exploited in France and at US Army bases on the first day of my vacation. Honestly think my only winning move here is to either buy a completely separate ISP ingress for the HVAC system or set a new subnet with only enough address space for the handful of microcontrollers needed for this new system. Time to start pushing on when the Danfoss is being retired and with how much gusto.
Yeah the margins are tiny because private equity has spent the better part of the century destroying American dynamism and outsourcing all externalities including getting hacked to the people.
This is only partly true, historically before private equity was a thing grocery was always a razor thin margin business that operated on volume. PE just made it worse.
My in-laws had a family grocery store back in the 60s and 70s. Privately owned and operated, no way they'd have been paying any attention to security concerns like this.
Their only chance would have been if appliance companies wouldn't be dumb enough to put a simple refrigerator on the public internet in the first place.
I know one German retailer from their storage warehouse point of view (not from the actual stores!). I made the operating system of fork lift terminals and visited quite a lot of their warehouses. And inside their warehouse there is zero connection possible to the internet, they are completely shielded. Their firewall ONLY allows connection to their (locally running) warehouse software.
A warehouse usually have LOTS of outdated equipment, security wise. Barcode label printers 15+ years without any firmware update. Voice dictation systems based on Windows XP. Things like that ... but as they closed down any contact to and from these systems to the outside, this is of little interest to them.
That's how we do it here, because we have decades old production machines running Windows XP and other vintage software. There's a completely separated production network, wires only, no WiFi, that doesn't have a connection to the office network, and is managed by a separate department.
The threat model of an insider is wildly different to an externally facing vulnerability. That doesn't mean there is no risk - but removing a class of attacker is an extremely useful outcome
I'm not network expert - but isn't this limited to the one case where somebody plugs in phone to charge from local computer at work, that is infected in specific way and can lockout the whole warehouse?9
Doesn't sound all that convincing to me. There is no need for network controlled fridges in the first place. And it's not like setting up that network control was free. This is not about saving money, this is about ignoring what IT people preach since multiple decades now, spending more for the attack vector and then loosing a lot of money when that attack vector gets used. Margins? If it were about margins the problem wouldn't exist.
(I can see the need for remote monitoring, that the freezer actually worked. Controlling the temperature is the issue.)
Do you say that as a supermarket manager, or a random person on an Internet forum? Because if it's the first, I'm very interested in hearing more on how you actually manage all the devices in your store and which ones require remote automation and which ones don't.
They are all being sold on the idea of granting external access to a cloud application so that a third-party contractor can know when the system goes into disarray and pay for one less maintenance guy's salary.
Could the same thing be done with SMTP way more securely than opening up your firewall to some random AWS EC2 instance? Yeah no doubt.
Do you think grocery retail execs actually understand computers past Microsoft Word and Excel? I report to one, they can barely listen to me say the word WAN failover.
Like all things in IT, experience is the best teacher. Organizations will fail to invest in their technology, security included, and only then will the execs start to trust that the wizards in the backroom are telling them truths instead of asking for new toys - if they're lucky enough to still be the same exec that heard they should take security seriously before the Bad Thing happened.
> They are all being sold on the idea of granting external access to a cloud application so that a third-party contractor can know when the system goes into disarray and pay for one less maintenance guy's salary.
Even in that case there is zero reason for the devices to be reachable from outside the network rather than the devices reaching out to known hosts only.
In that case it's just a tradeoff between convenience and security, it isn't because it would be too technically difficult to isolate the systems. Whoever installed them could isolate them if there was no reason for them to be connected to the internet. I doubt most grocery store managers understand the precise engineering behind their freezers either, but they still buy them.
Very likely they were sold on these internet-connected systems without being told about the drawbacks, which is sad.
The people selling the systems often don't fully know the downsides themselves either and in a sense they're incentivized to not know as it makes it easier to sell the lie that there are no drawbacks to having your HVAC system exposed to the wider web. But you are also overestimating the average skill of an IT person in these environments and the capacity for their IT or MSP team to step back and evaluate the security of all the systems they have to manage. There's only the ability to evaluate convenience vs security if you actually have the time to formulate the question - if you're drowning in ticket submissions you will likely fail to properly catch every such issue. Certainly for these larger EU corps they should have the capacity to make those determinations, but who knows exactly how the management of these systems were delegated. My bet would be it was the responsibility of an under-resourced team with too much to do already.
I'm catching issues as I can as the head of IT at an org replacing our Danfoss systems with something else, but it wasn't until about 1.5 years since the initial decision to replace them that I'm finding out from a sub-contractor of the contractor that there's a cloud app our HVAC network will need to talk to - which is not-so-funnily enough a requirement by the state for us to receive associated grant funding for a portion of the new system cost. This was never mentioned to me at all as the head of IT. It's not even a convenience vs security issue, it's a misaligned corporate communications and approval channels issue. In other words, the capacity to secure your technical systems is downstream of political organization.
Controlling the defrost was the issue here. The only way a cooler or freezer gets to 120F is by running the defrost overnight. And networked communication for sequencing defrost cycles IS essential so you don't run out of compressor capacity and/or run up outrageous electric demand charges. With the same communications you can sequence compressors and evaporators to get more stable temperature control, longer product shelf life, and may cut down on the compressor capacity you have to buy up front.
Then there is refrigerant leak detection, and automated calls and remote troubleshooting for the refrigeration vendor.
But since we've already got off-site access, why not throw in temperature controls so you can implement demand-based setpoints, schedules, and so the corporate facilities and product quality teams can keep an eye on things. They are required to keep detailed logs of each refrigerated space after all.
Any vendor selling grocery equipment without network communication is going to have a hard time staying in business.
I know somebody that works in HVAC. Two or three years ago they asked me about exposing the web-based controls for a meat processor's refrigeration system to the internet for remote administration. I advised them not to because it was an old janky-looking turd that hadn't been updated in something like a decade and suggested enlisting an IT person to stick a cheap OpenWRT router with Tailscale in front to protect it. Of course there was no money to do this so they asked what would happen if they did it anyway. The first thing I thought of was a disgruntled former employee turning the system off to spoil six figures of inventory and stink up the building. They paused for a moment and said "hmm... yeah, it sounds bad when you say it like that".
These aren't struggling grocery stores. They are massive businesses collectively running several thousand stores and employing hundreds of thousands of people. They have IT departments.
Revenue tells you scant little about the health and profitability of that business. Care to share profit and gross margin numbers? Grocery stores are notoriously low-margin.
Those numbers aren't available, but they're irrelevant to the point anyway.
The post I replied to (currently the top post on the article) is trying to paint a picture of some harried manager of a struggling grocery store having to fire up networking tools, which is ridiculous. A company doing tens of billions in revenue employs or contracts some of the "laptop class" (to use that post's terminology) to do that, regardless of what their profit margin is. They don't get a "shift-work labor class" employee to take a break from stacking shelves and check the firewall config.
I agree; you post some revenue numbers to try and prove a point that theses businesses have a lot of money. When someone reminds that revenue is not the same as profit, you state the numbers aren't relevant.
Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways. Especially when they are thin margins, fat ones usually try and protect the cash cow.
Revenue and profit are indeed different, and revenue is the relevant number here. If you need an explanation of why, perhaps someone else can furnish it. It's 2am here and I'm going to bed.
> Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways.
Yeah, and sometimes that results in someone turning their freezers into ovens. I don't think we disagree on this bit.
Having had a wonderful 4 hours of sleep, here's the free lesson I couldn't be bothered with last night:
Grocery store owner A's revenue last year was €500,000. Its profit was €0. It does not have an IT department because it's a corner shop that employs 2 people and has one computer.
Grocery store owner B's revenue last year was €50,000,000,000. Its profit was €0. It has an IT department because it's a huge fucking corporation with a thousand massive stores, multiple office blocks, 150,000 employees and all of the networking and IT infrastructure an operation of that size needs. It's considering opening a bank.
The number that tells you the difference between the scales of these two companies is the revenue, not the profit.
I need to stop wasting my time on the pit of ignorance this site has become.
I don’t have profits numbers but, as a customer, what I can tell you is that the large majority of those supermarkets are doing fine. They are renovated like brand new every couple years, they pop everywhere, they have money to innovate (E.Leclerc for example now have automated drive-throughs where your groceries arrive to you on a conveyor belt, serving dozens of clients in parallel directly to their car).
We also have a struggling supermarket chain (Auchan) and I assure you you can tell just by entering the supermarket that there isn’t a money issue.
Thin margin ? Sure, probably. But if there is enough money to build and develop brand new factorio-like contraptions, I’m sure they can handle fridge controllers well.
And yup, I worked for one of those three actors in their tech department and they are as much as tech-savvy than the other startup. And they have the same tech culture as your favorite startup : no real money issue and not a lot of care given as long as it is shipped.
I was talking to these guys when the faulty fridges got installed (early 2000's).
The IT director was usually a consultant with no say at the executive committee, let alone the board. Reporting to the "Secretary General", along with HR.
It took them a LOT of time to realize that digital was strategic.
There really ought to be a market for a little device that goes between the IoT/industrial device and the rest of the world and that acts like a fancy, self-updating proxy.
Conceptually, you have a physical plant and a PLC and maybe an HMI. Quite sensibly, no one wants to modify this once it works. But you also have a remote access system, and all the remote part should be through a proxy that is continuously updated and only grants access to authorized users. And preferably logs everything and also can act as a sort of web application firewall.
Tailscale is fairly close, and they should consider selling a secured (attested boot, tamper resistant) device with two Ethernet ports (PoE on the uplink side) and WiFi client device capability. Stick a serial number on it, let it be added to a tailnet, and make it impossible for anyone to add anyone else’s device to their own tailnet.
BOM cost would be maybe $20 - we’re talking higher end ESP32-class hardware plus the Ethernet hardware. 100Mbps would be adequate.
Hmm, startup idea: anyone could sell this. The device has a little bootloader and two modes. In provisioning mode, it attests to the mothership (mothership is the vendor, but enterprise plans give an air gapped mode where the vendor can provide a signed config blob and the device can fetch it over TFTP, PXE-style) for configuration. In provisioned mode, it does what it’s configured to do, and it can attest to its firmware + config for purposes of authenticated to, say, Tailscale.
I don't get it - it is not like the people working in a supermarket are expected to pay for securing the hardware in it. It is up to the owners who clearly have the money to run a supermarket chain not to keep insecure shit exposed to the Internet.
I’d be willing to bet many more HN users work for companies who are the ones creating unnecessarily network connected smart devices than work in infrastructure, trades, retail-adjacent positions that implement/use many of these network connected devices.
I used to work for a large retailer in Europe. IT and software engineering was counted in thousands, I don't think setting up a VPN is beyond ability of any supermarket chain.
I agree the average tech worker is woefully unaware of how tech illiterate the non-tech user is, but I would push back on the notion that basic security measures would've threatened the margins of a grocery store, and I am well aware of how they operate on single digit margins.
Tailscale pro pricing is $18 per user per month. Assuming you had one tech per store even, and 500 stores, that is a $9000 per month expense. Ok, not as bad as refrigerant and electric bill costs, but not great. So let's say instead of having a dedicated IT tech per store, we have 5 techs who work from HQ managing the infra for 500 stores.
$90. $90 per-month is all it would've taken to take these fridges off the public internet. If your margins are so razor thin that a monthly $90 bill would threaten profits, I question whether your business is even viable.
First you need to hire somebody who wants to do it. That costs more than $90 a month. Then they need to install whatever equipment is required to bridge the fridge controller to tailscale. Then finally you have a $90 a month cost.
I agree that corporate probably has the budget to do it properly. But the idea that the costs are just the monthly cost is Tailscale is laughable.
So what you're telling us is that there is tremendous opportunity for a startup to disrupt the space with new Refrigeration-as-a-Service (RaaS) products controlled by AI. That way we can replace those legacy microcontrollers with modern, secure GPUs and vibe-coded AI agents.
I find the case of having enough money to put all of that on internet and centralize management and not having enough of it to set up a rudimentary VPN unlikely. The money is not the reason.
Those systems are not cheap. It's not the case of lacking few hundred bucks to put it between a VPN box.
It is simply just "well, we weren't hacked before, why change?". Back when those were installed that was just not in the field of view and most those people worried about is changing default password.
And there is another case for industrial equipment, even if it is out of support, what you gonna do, trash a machine because of it ? No, it will be running till it falls apart or it will be more cost effective to replace.
> But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
You either pay small cost now, or bigger cost when someone finds out. So, yes, really. We live in times where you no longer have to pay $500+ for enterprise grade VPN box, you can do very acceptable security wise solutions on cheap hardware or on literally "any old piece of junk"
That's part of the problem. By the time the fully analog original equipment needed replacement, the only commercial replacements available already had been built for network access for quite a number of years while none of the purchasing people were keeping up-to-date with it.
Even the less-massive models are so expensive that the vendors can't fail to include the latest technology whether anybody is using it yet or not, because future. These things don't fly off the shelf very often either and lots of analog leaders "just" used temporary consultants to bolt on some networking without ever gaining any unwanted digital headaches and accompanying expertise.
Along with the routers of the 1990's, inexperienced users were supposed to be able to just connect it and have it work.
Lots of them never connected it to the web or any other network, or maybe years later when there should have been orders of magnitude more security considerations they finally plugged in a long enough ethernet cable and it just worked as they always expected it to once the future got here.
It hasn't been that many decades, conventional (lack of) wisdom is it certainly shouldn't take more effort to install than an analog unit would have required.
I understand what you're saying, but these systems are introduced as cost savers. The problem is that "management" then absorbs these savings, and doesn't invest in keeping them up-to-date. It may be a cut-throat business, but that 3% margin is only for a very little bit depending on the cost of maintaining the fridge's controller. Now the costs may well exceed whatever they thought they'd saved.
Thank you for saying this. It's quite frustrating to read some comments here that have obviously lost touch with the reality of the vast majority of people and businesses across the world.
So that’s the takeaway? “There is no money for this, so it just is what it is”? That’s insanity. So what now? Hope they don’t get hacked again, because by that logic there is still no money for upgrades and fixes, especially after losing a ton of money on spoiled inventory? But I guess that’s okay, only the “laptop class” actually cares. The supermarket lives in the real world with real challenges, none of that pesky security needed. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here.
I would say the takeaway is that it cannot be expected that the majority of businesses hire an IT security expert (let alone multiple, + technicians) whose job it is to keep on top of CVEs and apply updates to a variety of embedded devices. IMO it must be a legal requirement, which is now coming (e.g. NIS2), but it will take time.
Target learned the security lesson the hard way, but they definitely learned it. When I was there, security was one of the rare parts of the tech org I found legitimately impressive. (But also: I am not a security guy! Maybe their actual practices were compelling but flawed! But the organization as a whole was legitimately serious about it )
I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in Canada, looking at grocery stores in isolation makes little sense when most of the market is controlled by a handful of vertically integrated conglomerates. On top of the stores, they own a lot of the distribution, wholesale operations, real estate, and even some suppliers. Their own financials show record revenue and profit, year after year, and their margins have increased significantly over the last few years too. We can't reduce the economics of such integrated corporate groups to their retail net margins alone to judge profitability. As far as Canada goes, small margins my ass.
> their margins have increased significantly over the last few years too.
Empire (Sobeys et al) has seen consistent profit margin of ~2% for the last 2 decades.
Loblaws and Metro have higher profit margins at ~3-4% attributable largely to their acquisition of pharmacy brands which function as high margin grocer/convenience storefronts.
This is a pet peeve of mine (as a Canadian): I'm not going to write an apologia for the oligarchic grocery system we have in Canada, but when I hear about headlines about "record profits" it's alway about the amount — which of course will go up if revenues are up because of inflation of inputs/costs. But I always ask about the margins: have those gone up? (They generally are pretty steady.)
For (just?) this fiscal. By saving on IT costs in previous fiscal years they were perhaps able to book profits.
One incident every (say) decade or so may be determined to be worth the trade of between the costs of 'proper' IT practices and getting pwned (and the resulting spoilage) so they can book profits for the other nine years.
There is more than just fiscal reverie at play here. Real food was lost. You can't eat money and there is not an infinite supply of food. Actually France with this year heat waves saw also devasting results on many crops. Plus farmers have been one of the higher suicide rate for quite some time now, and there are obviously structural reasons to that.
Mercosur ain't gonna save the population from starvation if shipping cost start to reflect actual environmental, energetic and geopolitical impact, as the trend seems to go.
I can imagine that there's already an industrial security company at their door, offering a solution to prevent this from happening ever again, already tailored just for them.
Maybe it's even honestly not related to the attack.
If someone walks in and unplugs your refrigerator and causes you to lose all the stock in it, your insurance is going to cover you. You don’t need to show you locked the power sockets.
It depends if they entered by forcing through some security facilities or the door was full open with a white on red panel "the plug is over here" and a big arrow pointing to it.
Just latching on to this comment to add that it's probably a good thing (all things considered) this happened when it did - it's only one chain, so overall food supplies aren't impacted, and it happened during a relatively normal time period instead of during another crisis. The more hacks happen during peace time, the better prepared we'll be for not-peace time.
Exactly, and "Early reports indicate losses are already approaching 300,000 euros, but could run into several million euros nationwide." - IOW, the attack has cost far less money than it would have cost to prevent it with better security.
It's not entirely clear which comments/criticisms you're responding to when pointing out the lack of margin. Whose excuse is that? And what's it an excuse for?
Security isn't optional just because margins are low. If eg FedEx decided to disregard security because they only made 3% of the value of the packages they ship in profit, they'd lose most of that business fast. But yes, let's not shame folks for failing to preempt theoretical-yet-unseen threats, if that's what you mean.
I think it's that people who've never faced a security threat and never had to think to are among the most vulnerable. And grocery stores are notoriously thin margin businesses who actually strive not to spend unnecessary the most.
Ok, then why were their damned fridges connected to a network then?
"The chain wanted to have Internet enabled control and dashboards about their fridges" or something?
You don't get to say you want the perks of being Internet enabled and then turn around and say that protecting against the downsides would cut into your margins too much. Sheesh
Imagine instead you had 100 fridges and 3 walk-in freezers and 5 industrial compressors. Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?
Now imagine you had 50 such stores.
MPLS? Multi-site Domain? VXLAN? Absolute fantasies, can't be done.
But seriously, networked fridge systems are one of the most straight-forwardly practical use cases for networking tech to improve logistical latency in a supply chain. There are definitely lots of different solutions for securing it depending on scale though.
> Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?
Sure I would. And my very next thought would be "how do we secure that"
See also: the McDonald’s ice cream machines by Taylor, their half assed and overpriced vendor locked in system, the raspberry pi based alternative, and then the ensuing legal and commercial chicanery
The profit motive absolutely favors neglect, and may even punish attempts at reasonable maintenance
But the fridges are developed by corporate (laptop) workers, and the chains that buy them are also office workers. Nobody is arguing that an independent grocer or a shift manager get into cybersecurity, weak strawman
The reason why safety regulations are written in blood - is because no one wants to pay until the consequences become blatantly obvious and impossible to ignore.
Of course not. It is precisely because they have to fight for scraps that this is the place where workers are beaten down the most, because the owners are making pretty damn sure they will be the ones to get that margin lining their pockets, everyone else be damned.
In high-margin industries, you can give a 3% salary increase and free coffee and snacks, it is a rounding error compared to the 20% yoy increase applied to your multi-billion dollar compensation.
> Of course not. It is precisely because they have to fight for scraps that this is the place where workers are beaten down the most, because the owners are making pretty damn sure they will be the ones to get that margin lining their pockets, everyone else be damned.
My class-brained friend, margin is what you get after wages, not before.
I was talking about the supposed oppression of customers through high prices, but it’s typical that communists imagine that the purpose of an enterprise, private or public is to provide jobs to union workers rather than to actually useful products or services to customers.
Usually i'd feel like this was a large-scale operation but there's no denying that AI tools can copy/parrot/clone this type of work near instantaneously, so who knows.
But freezing is a local state, that shouldn't need more than auditing ?
The control loop "freezed -> unfreeze" should maybe not be exposed for action if it has such consequences.
Smart engineers will include a physical bypass in this sort of thing. Store employees should be be able to yank a lever to throw the thing in manual mode and get it off the compromised internet system.
This article theorizing US Army freezers were hacked to defrost, from late August this year - only about six weeks ago! - is prescient. It was posted here on HN.
Every medium sized or larger corporation or system in a wider sense has certain computer or software dependencies that were widely underinvested as mere "cost points", which are now (with the wide deployment of cyber capable AI) wide open, and visible. That is my reading.
It's another manifestation of the type of "corporate will rather save 300 dollars from not replacing your faulty motherboard than losing a 25,000 dollar business contract".
A crude but effective definition of intelligence is the ability to plan ahead effectively.
If poor decisions are being made it's not just evidence of poor decisions, it's evidence the frameworks used to guide those decisions are fundamentally unintelligent.
The fun part is that it is effectively impossible for us to estimate the actual trade off, so we can simply assume that our prefered solution is the economically correct one!
> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.
I feel like this is kind of holding the supermarket hostage and saying, “Sure your freezer is working fine, but if you refuse to buy new freezers from us prepare to get hacked.”
Sure you can argue that the supermarket should have just taken the old freezers offline. But you can also argue that the manufacturer could have supplied software updates but didn’t in order to force sales of newer models.
Maintaining old hardware to 2026 security requirements is damn near impossible, and what constitutes "old" is very variable; HOWEVER putting them behind a dedicated VLAN+firewall+VPN is not that hard.
I've helped do it for industrial equipment (win95 controller or something) that couldn't be upgraded without spending millions, but it sill required pulling out the old 10base2 network and installing cat 6 cables in a factory floor and new switches.
If that’s the case, then supermarkets (who are not in the cybersecurity business) should feel good about filing a claim with their insurance. The insurance company can decide whether the freezer maker owes existence-risking damages.
So, those fridges are in the supermarkets, right? Where people work, who have to empty a fridge before it can be remotely defrosted. Why can't those people just press a defrost button? What is the point of doing defrosting remotely when you cannot do it without the onsite support?
>Where people work, who have to empty a fridge before it can be remotely defrosted.
You don't empty a fridge with built-in defrost. Your home fridge defrosts itself every 12-24 hours and you don't have to do anything.
Normally, the temperature recovers in ~1 hour after a defrost. The attack is apparently chaining manual defrost commands one after another so that the interior gets way too hot.
That's way the non-smart walk-in coolers work; every 12 hours they turn off the fans and heat the cooling element for about 15 minutes to melt any ice that's built up on it.
Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.
> A critical security flaw dubbed HomeHack exposed 1 million LG smartThinQ IoT home devices, enabling hackers to easily gain access to users’ homes and take full control over any LG smart device connected to the account, including dishwashers, vacuums, air conditioners and washing machines, found security researchers from Check Point.
I moved to a new apartment with all this stuff installed.
At first I thought exactly that - just why.
When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.
When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.
My connected thermostat used the weather to determine expected outdoor temperature and sun exposure to adjust timing of heating and cooling as well as presence or absence of cell phone “at home” to adjust temperature range for savings. It also used cell phone approaching home to go back to normal temperature ranges.
My dumb thermostat also accounts for outdoor weather and sun exposure, simply by directly measuring the indoor air temperature which changes in response to those things. Dumb ones can also have schedule programming too. There's been plenty of times running errands when I approach home and then pass it up. Usually better to keep your temp constant than go through heating/cooling/big delta cycles generally speaking anyhow. One of those things where it feels like it makes sense but probably doesn't if you are coming back that day anyhow.
Connected A/C has been useful for me, because I also have a window fan and outdoor temperature sensors. So when target temp is below indoor temp but above outdoor temp, I turn off the A/C and turn on the venting fan. It's a lot more energy efficient.
Now, is it connected to the internet? Ha ha ha, no.
TIL what „data diodes“ are after discussing this incident with a friend and quickly brainstorming a cheap way of airgapping a system with unidirectional comms. We figured two arduinos and optocouplers should do it, turns out if you productize this and get everything certified you can charge up to 20k for it. Crazy!
Arduinos aren't fast enough, and don't generally do internet. To really make it work, you need a controller that has native ethernet, and NO wireless ports, or a really solid way of disabling them (like hooking their antennas to 50 dummy loads) A pair of them can then be proxies for the connection, and serve up status pages etc., without risk of ingress of control to the monitored system.
For me, the old timey Raspberry Pi B+ fits the bill.
One thing I'm wondering about is - does every grocery store in France have a public IP address? Or how are these devices reachable? Or are they all accessible through some custom dashboard with nginx as a reverse proxy? (in which case I would blame the IT department of the chain, not the vendor)
I totally understand monitoring the fridges remotely, i.e. making sure the retailer is careful about keeping frozen food... frozen.
Or detect a door that would not close anymore.
But why, oh why, did they allow someone to change the settings remotely? Wouldn't it work to just tell the local operator to adjust a physical knob when necessary?
Turning the lights off or increasing the temp because the doors aren't being opened (or making the PID controller less agressive), when the store closes could save a fair amount of money. Yes you could set the time manually if you change store opening hours but if you have a dozen or a hundred units your underpaid manager isn't going to bother.
If I were an evil genius at the head of some evil dumbfuck hierarchy and planned to put the world into chaos, I'd surely mandate shoving internet connectivity into everything that provides such technical feasibility, and then just exploit that one day.
Just like in that marvelous Argentinian cartoon "Mercano The Martian", the Idiocracy's little stepbrother.
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
No. Politicians will do no such thing. There have been hacks/attacks of internet-connected appliances for more than a decade. LG is notorious for demanding that appliances be connected (why does a washing machine do when connected to the internet?).
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time
They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.
For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.
What regulations would help with this? companies that actually host the models themselves can be regulated but open models can e abliterated or otherwise modified to stop them from refusing tasks. I'd be very wary of any regulations that prevent people from hosting or making their own models and weights.
Albert Heijn has 40% market share of Dutch supermarkets, and their distribution centers are shut down while they are working on this. Could become quite ugly quickly.
What if all manufacturers had to classify their product into internet connected i.e. smart or not. We mandate that manufacturer has to support updates for minimum 5 years or firmware source goes public. Have them put firmware source in escrow as well as have a way to update it.
If a manufacturer wants to reduce their liability then they have to release something to make it semi publicly supportable. With AI agents these days patching the firmware might one day be trivial.
Put some penalities with teeth behind this and maybe manufacturers will think twice before making everything smart.
> cyberattack, which has hit Danfoss-made refrigeration controls
Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now.
The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.
These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
I remember working on my car when I lived in an apartment. I'd take my tools out into the parking lot, and get to work. If I needed to use the potty, or get a snack, or whatever, I had to pack up the tools and take them inside. Then out again. It really stinks.
I currently live in a high trust neighborhood where I don't need to be present with anything outside.
The internet is global. These hackers could very well be government / military backed or bordering on terrorism. It's a lot more serious than petty vandalism and won't be solved by finger wagging about youths these days.
Companies and governments need to start taking security extremely seriously. Exposing insecure junk to the internet is a massive risk.
The article claims hundreds of supermarkets had their fridges destroyed at the same time. This is a massive scale attack to the countries food supply and very different to a person destroying a single fridge.
Cyber-vandals doing random attacks for the lulz incentivize, however weakly, stakeholders to securize their system.
Without them, all our infrastructure would crumble at the same time once an APT decides to go all in. At least here we get a preview of how bad things could get.
Digital hackers who cause real world harm effects should get treated like the terrorists they are with all that means in terms of the available inerdictions.
Nah, im glad hackers are exposing vulnerabilities in critical infastructure and logistics. Otherwise when some belligerent oligarch or politician or generally wealthy asshole decides they should rule everything they don't have easy avenues to fuck things up.
Not intentionally but yes it has a positive attribute if it happens on occassion regardless. How many millions of these units are in circulation that are vulnerable, how many others from other companies are built similarly? If someone wanted to start a war, attacking someone's food supply would help them immensely. And if this was just someone's blog post and bug report of "I can hack some refrigerator!", how many store owners and food suppliers would ever even notice or take seriously the risk? They spent money for these fancy systems that promised to help their business, and it ends up being a massively liability.
I never said otherwise. And if someone able to destroy and break things in my house remotely from anywhere in the world using hardware I bought, I would hope I could gracefully take it as a lesson for myself, and have a lot more questions for the company that sold me a product they assuredly claimed was secure.
In the U.S. the following brands are affected (systems were proactively taken offline):
* Food Lion, 1100 stores
* Stop & Shop, 400 stores
* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores
* Hannaford, ~160 stores
Websites are down at the very least.
May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery.
Mobile apps are down.
“In-app coupon” redemption is likely down.
US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.
I can see advantages to collating data for both organizations, but to it just raises the question, once again, of why simple appliances are connected to the Internet.
These industrial networks are often not internal to a single company, sometimes by necessity. They also are often installed in places with inherent connectivity difficulties, so sometimes you are bridging weird networks that limit what is possible just to get the signal out.
These aren't consumer fridges with wifi. The situation on the ground is significantly more complex. There are a lot of embedded sensors and control systems in supply chains in order to minimize waste.
Because a main user of this is the third-party HVAC contractor, and there's a operational cost to getting him set up on the grocer's VPN. (He has thousands of clients, that's in aggregate a lot of customers that would need to give him VPN access. He will do whatever the client asks of him, but he will bill accordingly.)
1. There's nothing simple about a commercial HVAC install, especially across a national chain.
2. Because they think (rightly or wrongly) that the benefits of monitoring and ease of maintenance and their contractor having direct access to the data outweigh the risks.
3. They think it outweighs the risk because IOT has been socially normalized, creating the wide perception that no, it's not that bad.
They almost certainly have insurance for this kind of event, and their insurer will almost certainly think real hard about the pros/cons of this, and will adjust rates accordingly. The grocer is free to take those rates into account when deciding on whether their next store will have an IOT HVAC.
Depressing to know that these CVEs were known since August.. and not one manufacturer forced an update to their always online devices.. and the regular customer will foot the bill for the incompetency.
Something different came to mind as I read this article - there has been recent chatter regarding impending Food security issues - it was even talked about by India's foreign minister recently:
1 data point of Yep.
I went to my local Monoprix to grab a few things during lunch break. For some reason they seemed to have suffered a fridge incident, good for me I didn't need anything from those aisles. I did wonder if it was just a recent problem or if a more sneaky malfunction had silently semi-spoiled some of the products I brought back days before, until it just blew over.
It really, really irks me that in one of the articles about this, it mentions the manufacturer pointing to "outdated firmware", and even comments here demeaning the store for not "securing" their __refrigerators__. Read that twice, and think how many times this silliness could apply to far too many objects in our lives.
Very few things should be networked, or at the very least, not with any sort of control. I can't even blame the average person anymore for not being as aware about technology, unless there's some sort of aggression or dismissive responses when they're informed of the risks or potential risks. Software developers at this point may very well end up being as despised as lawyers or bankers, for not broadly enough condemning this sort of technological creep, but for being that guy smugly saying something about firmware updates ... on a refrigerator.
On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.
It's not a margin issue. It is the stupid, childish, idiotic generation who refused to grow up, wanted everything to be a play toy, connected, smart intelligent etc. These kids, with no regard to overall consequences, and with their "science" and "technological progress", are making world a dangerous place to live in. They are turning inanimate things into connected monsters and calling it "human progress", because it give them childish joy, fame and business profit. The humanity slipping back into cradles, but with dangerous toys.
Purely anecdotal but earlier this year I had presentations from a couple of installers for industrial control systems for buildings and I was thoroughly disappointed.
TLDR multiple of the installers just wanted to have a public static IP address, and just drop the control systems directly on the internet. None of them knew who was responsible for device updates or CVE's. One of them had an optional proprietary yubikey type thing with no idea how it actually worked. One companies security assurances was basically they always do this and have never had a problem before.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for beyond-corp, but none of the companies we talked to seemed knowledgeable enough to risk it.
Just some insight into how the rest of the world operates, I would expect bigger companies to have more resources, but this is an example of what happens when you're small and dealing with "experts".
These are fridges in supermarkets, not home fridges. I think a supermarket capable of administering many fridges can put their big boy pants on and handle the potential downsides of controllability.
> The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered “in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS,” referring to battery management systems.
I think it's important to see if this could happen on a larger scale. What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints of food worldwide? What would happen to food prices?
There is probably enough variety in refrigeration technology that this scenario is unrealistic. There are many tens to hundreds of manufacturers worldwide.
Obviously, because they cannot be controlled over Internet. Also, some consumer Soviet refrigerators are still operating, they were made pretty reliable because one could not easily replace one.
The same happened to a major Dutch supermarket chain.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
Just when you think the golden age of hackers is over... Wasted food is bad, of course, but this is the kind of genius that military academies can never teach.
From French media, it appears that more than 270 supermarkets lost most of their frozen and refrigerated goods. The losses appear to be in the range of 50,000 to 150,000 euros per supermarket.
Someone's got to get the vulnerabilities patched before AI (sorry, SI) does a coordinated hit job. I like this one at a time thing than a complete dystopia. By next year, half of these will be patched, and people writing more secure software .... sorry one too many jokes :)
I regret that "hackers" were involved here. I wish hackers could be a positive term. People breaking into things for the benefit of others - open models, useful papers, lost media, distributed to the public for the benefit of all.
In this case "hackers" were the type to fuck up a supply chain utilized by the every person for the sake of it. If you have the skills for this, please file a report. Make the world better. But don't just go wrecking a bunch of goods for the lulz like this. It helps no one one, it sours the "hacker" ethos, and it hurts real people.
There is so much needless connection to the internet nowadays; this is the end result of a decade of shoving IoT into everything.
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
There are a bunch of good reasons to connect a commercial refrigeration unit to the Internet (via IoT). Notification when failover to the secondary cooling system happens, notification of when ambient temperature is too high, optimisation of energy consumption (especially after hours).
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
I didn't expect to spend so much time today thinking about fridges.
I have so many questions. If it's all so connected and monitored and notifies of issues, couldn't it notify anyone that the settings are weird, like continuous 50 degree Celsius defrosting? How much access did the hackers have, apart from temperature controls? Could nobody intervene quickly before the damage was done? Was there a way to "unplug" the fridges or they would just keep frying, so they had to get people across all the stores doing manual resets?
It can do all that IF YOU THINK OF IT and then write the program to do it. If you think of it - which is unlikely because it never happened before (or perhaps it did before but electronics are reliable and so you think it won't ever again).
These are commercial units. There is no plug. There is a circuit breaker in the back room, but general rules is only an electrician is allowed to touch them: if they are off there is always a good reason (until now) and so random staffers touching the panel to turn a breaker on is likely to kill somebody.
Look for "Danfoss AK-SM 720 user manual" and scroll through the pdf.
You'll find that these are quite complex control systems and their data may not be integrated into an operational or security control centre. So if they are not configured for, or resourced (in terms of operators), to handle anomalies, how do they notice and respond?
Without knowing anything about the attack it may be that the controllers were not connected directly to the public Internet, but an on-site VPN that became compromised some other way. Or with a compromised laptop of a technician that connected.
So while you are thinking about fridges today, think about how you would secure and operate control systems across tens of thousands of stores. Would that be easier without Internet connectivity? How do you get qualified and experienced technicians into each (air gapped) store? Another complexity is that many of these systems are part of facilities management systems (HVAC, lighting, security, fire control) and managed or owned by a completely different organisation that is not going to share their data.
I always feel like such a buzzkill and Luddite when talking about IoT. My sister-in-law excitedly told me how her air fryer can be controlled remotely via an app. I think she also expected me — a techie — to be excited, but all I could see was unnecessary risk and usage data being slurped up by a corporation. I'm sure there are lots of good applications of IoT; however, I don't think this is one of them.
And your SIL would just be as likely excited too about a MOEN wifi connected voice controlled kitchen faucet. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the water bill comes and cannot pin point where the additional water they claim to have not used has gone.
Then we move on to even more serious potential life changing appliances that are wifi connected of which your SIL would certainly just be as excited about. Wifi connected hot water tanks of which some here know how they work and what this remote ability allows. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the medical bills come nor every single passing day when she sees the visible scars she must carry for the remainder of her living days for being 'cool' - ironic huh?
Reality hits hard as most humans are reactive and those that have been in this game for many decades grossly understand the dark side of insecurely connecting devices that have life changing implications. Medical devices companies have already shadowed their software mistakes yet such information only stays in the shadows for so long.
"What you cannot see matters most!" and many tech illiterates are currently learning this in most unfortunate ways. Some of that learning will scar both mentally and physically for life. Ain't it cool!
Many people here reading this are a lot smarter than I and such can therefore extrapolate and add to what is unfolding in the world. It shows little sign of stopping as more and more devices are connected daily under the guise of 'easy'.
Thus the underlying absolute reason to "Stay Healthy!"
> there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is easy, getting people (esp. leadership) to give a shit is hard.
Control loop is obviously local and performed by dedicated controller hardware. If you only need remote monitoring then don't expose any management functionality.
If you want remote management, then define an envelope of allowable system parameters that can be controlled remotely. Allowing defrost to be initiated remotely has obvious risks and known solutions - add a hardware interlock, like a physical button or a key switch.
Even if you ignore all other precautions and allow all parameters to be controlled without limitations, strong authentication is still easy to implement, if anyone cares enough to do it.
Europe must pass strict software building codes to prevent this from reoccurring. Unless software is required to be built in a secure manner, and independently verified (ala building inspections), all of Europe may be destroyed by cyber flaws.
Fridges tend to have built-in defrost cycles these days. Without that, ice builds up around the coils that ordinarily cool the compartment (and by extension the ambient moisture in the air, encouraging it to condense). And you'd have to thaw it yourself from time to time.
It's probably just running the heat pump in the other direction. 50° sounds about right for the hot side. I expect that the hotter the better, because it will melt the frost without warming the food. And if a bad guy hacks in to the freezer, he can probably override any kind of temperature control and just tell the compressor to run full out.
Every refrigerator has a defrost cycle - which is just a heater. It normally only runs for a few minutes at a time, but if you change some bits around, it could run for a lot longer and a lot hotter.
Controversial opinion: these things need to be kept "insecure by default" so people will learn not to put them wide-open on the Internet but behind an actually secure VPN.
...and meanwhile, here we have (mostly smaller) supermarkets with decades old "dumb" equipment which would be completely unaffected by such things.
…and that’s a good thing, as this non critical incident will raise awareness for safety in more critical domains like power plants, medical devices… oh who am I kidding.
Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.
I wonder if AI would have helped in this situation.
For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human.
I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application.
"But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...
Maybe, just maybe, fridges shouldn't be online. Cue immediate responses of: but don't you understand, management can now monitor it 24/7 and adjust in real time. To which I have about the same response:
I would maybe tone that down that sentiment a bit and limit the adjustement.
You actually do want to be able to monitor them remotely, like most industrial/commercial refrigeration, to detect failures faster and more reliably. They should still be at least secured with normal auth/autz in addition to perimeter security, though.
If I can know when a fridge failed within the hour (even at night) then I can also dispatch a technician same/next day more easily.
Same reason website's are remote controllable. There's someone who's job it is, is to make sure the fridge is up and running, 24/7 and for the same reason that website operators/SREs don't live at each POP/DC, that fridge operator wants to remotely be able to flip some relays off and on to fix the problem without having to drive onsite, if possible. Additional, a single person/fewer people can then also be responsible for multiple/more sites.
That’s exactly right. There all all sorts of read-only architectures where the device can be monitored without every directly accessing it:
- The device’s control has a radio transmitter that emits its readings, but no receiver. Listen for those messages to monitor it but there’s not a physical path to reply to it.
- The device’s controller writes a database or message queue. Its code never reads from that source. Monitors listen to those messages.
And many, many similar methods with the same core concept: the item transmits its status but doesn’t have a method to receive replies. You just have to commit to using any one of those thousands of mechanisms.
I have a read only temperature sensor in my old-school non-computerized refrigerator and freezer. Hack until the cows come home but it still can't turn off my freezer.
Good. You've got a read-only widget that monitors your freezer.
If it were hacked to start delivering temperature readings that were dangerously-high while you were out of town, then: Would you keep the food, or discard it?
1) you'd wonder what broke
2) you'd wonder why it fixed itself
3) you'd check the ice cream when you got home
4) ice cream is fine, must have been a bug in the temperature reporting.
Air-gapping, network segregation, data diodes, etc. are all real things. It's possible to make a read-only refrigerator that is "unhackable". I have a temperature monitor in my refrigerator right now. Hack that monitor and it doesn't affect my refrigerator at all.
Depending on the make and model, send a reverse feed code and then overwrite with block characters. You will know that something bad happened, but you won't know what.
That makes it inconvenient to read, not impossible. E.g. use transmitted instead of reflected light (shine a bright light behind the paper) to see how much ink is in each place.
There is value in nuance and debating whether the solution should be scaled down to say a store ( or only available on local vlan or something), but I think the value of discussing that is kinda diminishing, when, apparently, the controls for all stores can be done from the same hit.
But to address your specific point:
being able to monitor does not ( or at least should not ) automatically equal put it on the web
There are most likely IT governance problems: builders bought fridges, IT didn't provision sufficient access, installers put 3G keys instead of spending time getting the correct VPN/networking, and a few months later no one knows how this thing works, and IT is not mandated to find out that shops ever did that.
This still shouldn't be online. They can be networked, if you need remote monitoring, but that's different from being online (at least in my definition).
Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.
This line suggests the units themselves were targeted individually with a hack:
> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.
But the problem with networked devices spread across tens of thousands of pretty much unguarded locations, surrounded by unvetted employees, but taking orders form a central location is that there is no such thing as "not online". They'll talk to the management server used to set up the nightly defrost schedules across the fleet. Even if they are in an isolated VLAN, it's always one step away from someone connecting a Pi to that network and off they go online. There's only so much zero-trust, NAC/802.1x and segmentation can do when some devices will be too old to support these and their network will be the entry point to the management server, then to the whole fleet.
I'm honestly very surprised that a couple of things things haven't happened yet: the central server for managing these fleets getting hacked and allowing access to the entire fleet, and/or the companies realizing that the only way to limit the reach of an attack is to physically not have the hardware needed to do remote control.
So this is how it was done 25 years ago: Only the used ports (ethernet jacks) on a network is activate, disconnecting a device and the port closes. That strictly speaking doesn't mean that there aren't way to get devices on the network, but it does make it a lot harder. You're absolutely correct about these networks being in hostile environments, but why then do we pretend that they are not? Fridges like these have never not been in a hostile environment, so why aren't basic security measures taken to secure the physical side of things?
In my world the central server can be hack in two ways, that is by a malicious operator or via some scheme like the US/Israeli attack on Irans uranium centrifuges. The central server also have no business being online, that to is on a closed network, running the whitelisted applications from the manufacturer.
This is how it was done in this [0] very nice 60 years old (I'm sad now) movie. [Spoiler alert] An alarm is triggered so many times the guards just disable it. Alert fatigue has worked the same forever. Nobody wants to check the thousands of false alarms that probably happen every day across thousands of locations.
As long a schedule is conceived in one place and applied in another, even with human intervention on both sides, either one of the sides can be swindled. At this point with the bar for a successful hack being lower than ever, completely removing the hardware necessary to make remote changes is probably the only way to limit the blast radius.
Maybe allowing to send the schedule but requiring a local employee to operate a local hardware only control to apply it could work, but who has the money for this kind of complexity. Something like this on every freezer (device, really) in a fleet probably costs multiples of the money they lost with the spoiled food.
this definitely does not require a fridge be "online" and have the ability to be remotely programmed. At the very least have the monitoring and potentially I/O capabilities in a different device that can easily be removed from the system. Integrated smart fridges deserve to Suck it, Jin-yang!
Like the other poster mentioned, blanket statements like this ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
I have a smart fridge and washer. I won't name names. But for several years they were never connected or online at all (unless they was compromised and I didn't know). I connected them and one of the first updates included in the washer was changing the default wash cycle from something like 110 minutes to 46 or something. I don't remember all the values if I'm honest.
There are executives who have spreadsheets and charts of how much water that saved per household over varying periods of time. How much it would save with greater adoption. And the unsaid message, or maybe they'll be explicit, of how many people are going to face tragic water supply issues in the future.
It's a powerful message, even if we know it's cyncical and calculated to push not just washers, but firmware security systems and institutions to govern those systems.
And yes, compromised systems can also be used to build zombie networks to push horrible content.
I feel horrible that this critically important surface issue of water supply is used to push other agendas. I honestly wish I could do other work not related to it.
<< ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.
More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:
I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.
In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.
>Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control.
Which is how they got into this situation. These are industrial refrigeration systems subject to a huge list of variables (how many units, their sizes, and doors hooked up to a refrigeration circuit, open vs closed cases, ambient conditions, hours of store operation, what type of refrigerant, whether heat is going to a cooling tower or air heat exchanger). They use a ton of energy, and percent optimization leads to millions of dollars over a fleet. They are designed to let the user dial in every operating parameter, like defrost.
Compare this to my home fridge where all these parameters are fixed in the firmware because the hardware is 100% identical.
Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
Agree. I don't want fridge company or anyone else to turn my fridge into residential proxy with its access sold to the highest bidder to build web scrapers.
Monitoring would be one thing, but there's almost no conceivable reason to allow setting the temperature or triggering a defrost cycle remotely. When was the last time you changed the temperature setting on your fridge or freezer? It's something you set once when you install it and then never touch again.
This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.
> This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.
Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to connect any home appliances to the Internet. I have a limited number of Zigbee devices, and they are managed through Home Assistant and can't access the Internet.
Yes, I have similar strategy. But in all cases I'd prefer to just buy analog appliances. There's no good reason to put a digital computer in a refrigerator. A bimetallic thermostat does the job just fine.
> When was the last time you changed the temperature setting on your fridge or freezer?
Then again when was the last time you opened your freezer hundreds of times during one day, letting humid air in and building ice at an accelerated rate? These units actively heat up the back of the freezer (evaporator plate) nightly to quickly melt the ice without warming up the food.
There is no reason to directly trigger it remotely but they probably work on a customizable schedule, to account for different store opening times, timezones, or freezer size and model. The hackers could target that schedule to make the defrost last longer.
You're right, a commercial freezer is a different beast than a household one. But what good does it really do anyone to be able to adjust that defrost schedule remotely? Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
Within a store certain freezers get more traffic than others, depending on how they're stocked, where they're located, etc, and therefore likely require more frequent defrosting. But that's something the store managers can figure out. It doesn't need to be managed remotely by some third party. So why did someone engineer that capability?
More features, generally, means more failure modes. More ways to exploit the system. Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion. It's very unhealthy and disordered behavior from an engineering standpoint--sacrificing reliability and simplicity for... what exactly? Some centralized control capability? But why?
That's like saying the store manager should manage the store website and networks instead of the chain's IT department.
No grocery store manager is going to be a licensed refrigeration technician. Ask them if they know about basic refrigeration concepts like superheat and subcooling, high side and low side pressures, compressor oils...
Further, a grocery store wants to optimize efficiency down to the percent, because that will save tens of millions of dollars over the fleet, and CO2 emissions. A store manager hardly has the capability.
You're confusing specialized refrigeration maintenance (which, at least in the US requires EPA certification) with general end user operations tasks. It is the store manager's job to know how to operate, optimize, and take basic care of their equipment. Just like it's an excavator operator's job to know how to check the fluids and grease the machine. They don't need to rebuild the engine or do specialized maintenance like lineboring, but they are responsible for basic care of the machinery.
To be clear I don't think the defrost schedule is the way the hackers enabled this or else every device would be affected. The older devices probably connect to the SaaS server in an insecure way and could be exploited en-masse.
> Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
The purpose of the automation is the same as always, to run at peak effectiveness and reduce human error. Most of the workers in this industry much like the fast food one, are low paid, low skill, receiving only basic training, with a high turnover rate, across tens of thousands of locations from major cities to somewhere in the sticks. Even a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage that's only obvious too late. So this extra work is taken out of their hands. You should really see a lot of the machines the big fast food chains use, you'd be amazed.
This kind of decision was never left to the store manager. In the past they'd get a printout and probably fail to follow the instructions occasionally, which may or may not cause damage or increases operating costs across the entire fleet. Now it's done over the network like everything else, for better or worse.
> Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion.
> More features, generally, means more failure modes.
Here's the kicker, they are necessary and desired by the customer and the failure scenarios were almost definitely factored into their calculations. I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
And normally I'd agree (more) with you but the small scale of the hack makes me think they've done a decent job at securing them so far. Spending more on people and security to avoid any hack (right?), or losing efficiency over tens of thousands of locations costs more than the spoiled food.
I'd be fascinated to know how much impact on TCO remote control actually has. There's definitely an economy of scale argument, if you can make tens of thousands of devices a couple percent more efficient that has a real impact, but does the remote control capability actually move the needle that much?
There isn't a complex real time control scenario here.. Obviously defrosting too much wastes energy, so you'll want to get that one right. But does having centralized control over that really make a difference at scale? Does having centralized control over temperature set-point make any difference?
From the basic physics of the process it's hard to imagine real time remote control being a decisive factor in efficiency.
> I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
I mean.. maybe? But nothing you wrote actually demonstrates that.
[edit] I guess if it's not about efficiency but instead a trust issue then it makes more sense from a marketing standpoint. But generally remote control isn't a great way to work around untrusted operators with physical access. They could just prop a door open or slice the seal if they wanted to..
It's not a maybe. They simply shouldn't. The level of idiocy of not only management but also those who implemented the "security" protecting those online fridges cannot be understated: we're talking about real dumbfucktards.
I see such idiots daily, in all venues of life: the world is simply really full of dumbfucks.
It's simply how things are and we shouldn't be afraid of pointing it out.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?
I'd hope what we'll actually see is people finally demanding that appliances with no need of an internet connection don't get connected to the internet!
Even if you are keeping updated buying your new fridge every 2 years like the manufacturer wants, that still doesn't guarantee you are out of the woods from this issue. By definition, security patches are retroactive, after it has been made obvious that there has been a security incident.
Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?
On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).
The article makes it sound like these were intentionally networked refrigerator control units, not the actual refrigerators. But I’m not an expert, so I can’t rule out that it’s not possible to run a commercial refrigerator without one of these.
I mean, you could also argue that the lack of reliance on physical controls caused the incident in part. For example, a City's public works department may have remote access/control for some of their equipment, but they also have a kill switch that removes all connectivity and reverts the system to a default setting. They also have checks in place like "if the unit heater will be overamped, turn it off." This seems like it was caused by a lack of security considerations when making these devices "online". Old tech can work very well for a long time as long as it is modernized correctly.
I realized upon reading too this was the same Danfoss fridges that got hit for .mil bases in the US. There's probably a shodan signature to find them on the internet because HVAC people don't know about network security, and someone has a trivial exploit to access them due to shitty ancient embedded controller security in them.
This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
Yes, not exactly "unprecedented." The news of Commissaries having their freezers hacked should have been a kick in the rump for everyone else with infrastructure needlessly connected to the Internet.
I don't disagree, but having remote monitoring capabilities on a professional fridge is most likely not a hipster feature. Even mid-size supermarkets have dozens of them, with different temperature settings; they can fail, customers can block the doors, etc. You do want to receive an alert when something is wrong.
These are industrial fridges, the ones almost the size of a shipping container that you find in major supermarkets. But I agree with you that 'smart' home IoT is a shitshow.
Honestly I like smart appliances. For example, I have a home assistant integration that will sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room, and a handful of other similar safety-related conditions.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
1. We prefer to be safe, and shut the burner off while going to take a leak. It helps that we have a several thousand watt induction stove that boils pots of water in a few minutes, so there is no real need to parallelize boiling water with bathroom breaks.
We specifically want to prevent scenarios like: you take a leak, the leak turns into a shitting session or a phone call, you forgot you left the burner on.
2. Most of the time my wife and I make food together so if one person needs to take a leak the other one is around anyway.
3. For long slow cooking, we have plenty of comfy seating in the kitchen/dining area where we can get work done while being in sight of pots.
4. We have 2 pets we'd need to locate in an emergency, and so we tend to put electrical and fire safety higher than most people.
Of all the things to put on a network, this ranks as one of the dumbest, ever. You don't need control of the unit done over a network, just the data on whether it is working or not. Anything else is simply asking for someone else to come along and break your stuff.
To boot, refrigeration has been wholly automatic for decades. It literally runs itself. It doesn't need any network connectivity other than to say "I work" and "I'm broken" and that's it. Allowing control commands to be sent over the network is, yet again, just asking for trouble.
I feel no pity for them at all. If they're too stupid to secure their fridges (which seem to be accessible over the internet) than that's their deserved pain.
Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet.
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
Russia will never attack NATO, that would be their death knell. NATO is a hundred times stronger than Ukraine, who are kicking Russia's ass as we speak. I even suspect that if Putin were to order an attack he would be put down by his own people.
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
You think about a frontal attack like in Ukraine, and maybe you're right. But Russia is already waging a much more subtle war against NATO. Look at who's leading the US. Look at Brexit. Or look at who could soon lead France or Germany... Their conventional army may be weak, but they don't need to fire a bullet either.
Look at the former Soviet republics that helped Russia win WWII by supplying it with an almost limitless supply of soldiers. All of them have refused to allow their citizens to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Their political influence, even with right-wing politicians who might be skewed their way, will be limited. And could change at any moment as we've seen with Orban.
> And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Russia continued WW1 with a civil war that lasted until 1922. Their military deaths were quite evenly split between the world war stage and the civil war stage.
And the might of the US/UK/etc are a hundred times stronger than the Taliban in Afghanistan, however who ended up winning that war? Or how about Vietnam?
My point being: the size/capability of a military doesn't necessarily result in a win. I think NATO forces have a particular problem of being pretty unmotivated about Ukraine winning.
I would like this to be true but I'm not sure (at least when talking about NATO = Continental Europe). A quick search reveals Russia made 41 jet fighters last year, Europe made 40.
I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.
GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.
You're assuming rational behavior, but time and time again world leaders have demonstrated that they will pursue erratic behavior if their feelings or vibe suggest them that behavior to be their way out of their own trouble.
You do know that wars are not “muh supurmun is bazzilion times stronger than your balk!!”?
Russia doesn’t need direct attack on NATO to intimidate, or even destroy the alliance. And even if it did attack NATO member, it is going to be guess what? A discussion. Just like what they have right now. It’s not going to be DEFCON style theatrical attack from the united West on Russia. You know what happens during WW2? When Russia and Germany carved up Poland? Nothing happened when France declared war on Germany. There was a period of 8 months where they just stared at each other. It was called “Phoney war”. Chances are we might witness Russia just steam rolling Baltics while the West talks between each other what to do next.
Russia cannot invade Europe, that is nonsense peddled by the EU establishment to support their idiotic military Keynesianism as part of a plan to reboot EU manufacturing.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
To be fair, that they are struggling to take over a couple of villages in Ukraine is in large parts due to the intensified arms and ammunition production of the entire EU (and in the past that of the US). And that's only enough for a standstill
Ukraine did a spectacular job to stop the full-scale invasion in the initial hours, days and weeks when there wasn't much international help yet though (and I guess from that moment on the war didn't go quite according to plan from the Russian PoV).
Let‘s not underestimate the corruption within Russian intelligence services, that resulted in invasion without any meaningful military planning. They spent the budgets corrupting Ukrainian elites and brainwashing population of the Eastern Ukraine, probably taking a cut in their own pockets, but they were not expecting to be held accountable for the result. The success of Ukraine in early days was in the element of surprise. Their resistance was not expected by Russian leadership, and the invasion itself was not expected by the middle ranks of Russian military. It did not go according to the plan, but plans change, and this war demonstrated weaknesses of all major powers - in a way, Russia did tick some boxes. As successful Ukrainians were in that moment, NATO has lost the war for them failing to mobilize in time, also taken by the surprise (as if CIA weren’t warning months ahead that this is going to happen).
If Patriots, tanks and ammo would start flowing in the first weeks, maybe we would see peace in Istanbul accords in 2022 already.
Ukraine could've done much better if they'd mobilized and fortified their borders before the invasion. But Zelensky refused to do so (despite warnings from the U.S.) because war with Russia was hugely impopular with voters in Ukraine before the actual attack. They'd much rather stick their heads in the sand.
So a lot of their territorial loss can be attributed to his inaction. If they'd laid several million landmines in the Donbass the Russian attack would've been stumped and the occupied Crimea would've been easy prey.
Did they have capacity to do that at the time? Maybe Russia's first move would simply be elsewhere. there is a lot of border to mine especially when you include belarus.
Afaik this really isn't true. Most of the drone parts used both by Russia and Ukraine are coming from China, or Soviet surplus.
It used to be much more true. The Biden admin sent a lot more US weapons to fight Russia, Trump used to be much more amenable to send similar weapons provided somebody paid for it.
Nowadays US materiel is either tied up in the middle east or somewhere else (Patriots), or has been neutralized by Russian EW (HIMARS), or the US is just unwilling to part with it for whatever justification.
Standstill with Ukraine looks bad, and authoritarian regimes can survive almost anything except looking bad.
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
Nuclear weapons are no option. Russia would be wiped off the map before they could push that button.
A single Tomahawk missile could obliterate Moscow which would immediately end the war because Russia is extremely centralized. It's the reason almost 80% of all Russian SAM capability is stationed around the city.
Putin is unpredictable but he's not stupid. You don't become president of Russia by being stupid.
Putin is extremelly predictable, which allows the western warmongers to do nefarious things knowing very well he’ll assess the long term risks and be very cautious and accept limited damage to prevent a larger conflict. Use your grey matter and think logically instead of parroting propaganda.
Large scale invasion is not likely, but they could try some limited operation to test NATO's unity. Most likely location would be somewhere in the Baltics.
Lmao they literally assassinate people with nerve agents on British soil as is and get told they're naughty boys and not to do it again please.
I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).
I have read some Asian country's (who are friendly with Russians) government foreign affairs required readings that is like 2 year old by now. Those materials say Russia is being cornered. They had no other option to but to invade Ukraine. But with sanctions they are more cornered and are desparate. They thought China would ally would them but China's selective neutrality is making them desparate. Those documents say that Russia never actually deployed their main regiments and only worked with mercenaries and allied country armies.
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
> They had no other option to but to invade Ukraine
This is of course a stupid lie they are telling themselves. They've been invading Ukraine since 2014. They had the option of being good international citizens, with an elite flying to the west and buying some football teams for their entertainment, but they chose not to do that.
> Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that.
Russia can retreat inside their internationally recognized borders at any time. The problem is they don't want to sue for peace because that would admit losing, and include losing illegally annexed territory. They've made no serious attempts at even starting negotiations with Europe, while escalating "hybrid warfare".
Citation needed for "that is nonsense peddled by the EU establishment".
I'm living in europe and listen to many political news, both domesstic and abroad. And I never heard anyone saying that they actually want to invade "europe", at least not as a hole.
There are analyzers --- but not at EU "establishment" level, whatever that might be --- that claim that Russia, after 4+ year long regeneration phase after the Ukraine war might invade parts of Estonia. Already they started with some hybrid stuff there, with some new "people's republic Narva" drawn out of a magic hat.
Also, there is no need to "reboot" EU manufacturing. For example, Germany had the highest export numbers it ever had in June, 139 billion euro in just one month.
Other than that: Russia is estimated to have lost 1.5 million people already in this "3 day special military operation". No one in his right mind assumes that they can start another thing like now.
They however have gained LOTS of skills on what works and works not, military. E.g. the trickle-in strategies, glide bombs, drone warfare works. A navy without support, tanks and even airspace superiority attempts don't work.
What e.g. german military generals say is: Russia is already in a hybrid conflict (they didn't use "war" as word) with Germany. One can see this by attempts to destabilize the society, by very high level of espionage (said to be higher than during cold war times), to drone reconnaissance jobs over military AND civil infrastructures (logistics, power, railway etc). And by the odd attack on things here, like people or weapon manufacturers.
Not Europe but a few Baltic states are feasible. No one says they can hold it, but Putin has his own reasons so we should not think we can conclude on future Russian actions based on what we consider reasonable - e.g. no one predicted that a war on Ukraine was likely as it seemed to be completely irrational and self-defeating.
If nothing else, war has been many times convenient to keep regimes in power (see Bush post 9/11 for an obvious example). Putin might want to strengthen his case. See absurd discussions / push for a "Republic of Narva" as an example cause belli.
A sect of realpolitik theorists outlined why Russia would be compelled to invade Ukraine. Even Kissinger thought that expansion of NATO westward would compel war with Russia. To say no one predicted this or that it’s self-defeating for Russia is a mistake of analysis. The war logically follows from Russia’s security goals.
> The war logically follows from Russia’s security goals.
This framing is found only in propaganda put out for foreign consumption. Professionals like Kozyrev, who was the minister or foreign affairs of the Russian Federation (1990-1996) and in charge of rebuilding RF's international relations after the disintegration of the USSR, have openly called this bullshit that only manipulated idiots believe, because the "security goals" argument makes no sense whatsoever if you spend more than 10 seconds on it.
According to Kozyrev, instead of a patchwork of dysfunctional countries at war with each other like in the former Yugoslavia (with overspilling effects on Russia), EU and NATO integration helped build modern, peaceful and predictable countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which in practical terms meant "free-of-charge security" (his term) for Russia. What's there to complain about?
Furthermore, Mearsheimer et al treat countries as monoliths and completely ignore the competing interests of groups and individuals within them. Russia of the early 1990s was a flawed democracy; today it is a totalitarian dictatorship. The war against Ukraine is a downstream effect of the destruction of Russian democracy and consolidation of absolute power into the hands of Putin's security apparatus gang. Putin wants to be remembered as a "great ruler" and that's all there is to it; a small man who managed to gain absolute power, no different from Hitler.
I might struggle to occupy your garden, but how are you going to stop me from drilling holes in your house and planting lots of rats so they destroy your life and you run away yourself?
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
> They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
Because Russian leadership is acting in self interest and preservation and a neverending state of war might be what secures its own position and power.
They cannot win, but they can invade. We're already in a hybrid war. The threat is real and Europe needs to be prepared and be able to stand on its own, especially now that also the US is not only directly threatening EU countries, but is acting against EU security both globally and internally by supporting separatist neo-Nazi pro-Putin parties.
people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
They most likely are. Third party techs then access them over Citrix or VPN/RDP. There could be some cloud portion that aggregates data or pushes policies and schedules as well.
If it were transmit only, you could put it behind a data diode and buggy report code wouldn't matter. Even better, validating the code is a lot easier if it doesn't accept attacker input.
Yes, I always find it very useful to condemn the mosquitoes when someone is bitten. If they aren't heartily condemned, they will be legitimized and emboldened.
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
Russian car mechanics know how to "unlock" Chinese cars that operate only within China and require a Chinese SIM card (they are sold locally at lower prices, so some people find it cheaper to buy a car in China and unlock it). Finding and disabling modems is definitely an easier task and can be done.
This came up on HN somewhere, and the answer was that insurance will decline claims if the modem wasn't in at the time of a crash, so it's risky not to have it. That and you fail inspection, but that's of course easier to work around.
Offtopic: I only see "genius" used these days to describe an idiot. I guess this is how words change meaning over time. At some point in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
That's because calling an idiot an idiot plainly is apparently considered uncouth and attracts downvotes, flags and downvotes often mean oblivion. In fact you will find do-gooders chome in with "be civil" but you flip the word and it's all kosher. The thing is all of us do and say idiotic things. So that makes a bit tricky indeed.
> in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
If you are not a genius and someone calls you a genius, well, for you the future is already here, genius! (Shit I didn't really mean that :P)
There’s a lot of this in African-American vernacular. I’m not exactly sure what a “bad bitch” means but I believe it means attractive whore, but does it or does it just mean a good woman? Either way that’s two traditionally negative terms that seem to be used positively.
Good. I’m not happy that this happened. That’s a large financial loss. I don’t like thinking about all the good, edible food thrown away instead of nourishing people. But the infosec thing that keeps me up at night is the utter lack of SCADA security. “Relax! This dam won’t collapse as long as no one guesses our public IP address!”
Lots of industrial controls haven’t been updated since they were deployed in the 90’s. “And why should they be? If it ain’t broken…” Well, because they’re freaking broken!
So I’m glad that this happened in a tangible, public way people can easily understand without it involving something much more drastic. If your family asks about this, explain that you’re glad no one blew up a gas pipeline… yet.
Oh, one of my pet peeves: "if it ain't broken don't fix it"? Then you're going to fix it when it's broken, everyone is screaming at you, there's little time, and cannot reason clearly ... what a stupid saying.
There is certainly a need to raise awareness of the danger of connected/online devices. If something is connected to the public Internet then it can be attacked. If something has built-in wireless connectivity then it can be attacked. Unfortunately it really is as simple as that. Safeguards are needed accordingly.
Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most. There have been numerous examples of lax security in this area already and a fleet of rogue cars or delivery trucks could obviously cause huge amounts of damage, injury, and loss of life.
There's a legacy of openness in car tech and software that was never designed with robust security and isolation of critical components in mind. I've heard that this has started to change more recently and that's reassuring if true. But this still feels like an area with far too little regulation or oversight given the past choices of vehicle manufacturers and far too much rush to connect everything up remotely even for minor convenience reasons.
In some cases there also now seems to be legally mandated connectivity for things like automated emergency calls after an accident. This should at least have a genuine benefit in the unfortunate situation that it's needed - but until vehicle security looks more like Fort Knox than a sandcastle it might still prove to be a bad choice in the end.
> Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most.
Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. Find the cellular modem fuse and pull it. You now have a modern, but fully offline car. Security aside, connected cars are absolutely awful for your privacy.
That's a workaround, not a solution. And a partial one at that since it only affects your own vehicle; you'll still be in danger from other people's connected vehicles.
Unfortunately that straightforward solution might also compromise other aspects of the vehicle and/or might also be illegal if it disables a mandatory safety system.
The "straightforward" solution is to tell vehicle manufacturers that they aren't allowed to sell vehicles with connectivity unless they also have proper security and privacy protections in place. If no-one can give them money for it then they won't do it.
> illegal if it disables a mandatory safety system.
I am not aware of such a requirement in the U.S. In any case, it would be extremely difficult to enforce, and many cars that initially had connectivity went offline when 3G networks were decommissioned. I doubt those cars are now "illegal."
This is terrible. But, at the same time, why now? This seems like something you'd want to hold onto for use later as a nation state. And there's no money to be made here since you can't really ransom it. Was this just a petty attack to scare the public?
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
Script kiddies are on LLM steroids now. I’m so glad I kept my home "smart" stuffs fully disconnected from any network. No, I can’t control my home temperature from the other side of the world when in vacation, and so can’t the rest of the world until they physically enter it.
I think that's exactly what happened. A kid found out (via an LLM or otherwise) that fridges' temperature were remotely controlled, probably with lax security (or no security at all) and decided to play with it.
It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control; a supermarket is a place where there are always people, it's not a base on Mars. And even if a remote is needed, it should probably not go further than the manager's office.
> It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control
I don’t know to what degree control is needed, but remote supervision of cold holding temperatures is good to make sure food doesn’t spoil. Most places that don’t have networked fridges have staff manually logging the cold holding temperatures to make sure things are working.
Again, though, I don’t know about making changes though.
In this case it's not like the devices were turned off, they were put on "defrost" which means heating up to 50°C (122°F). Why would you need the ability to remotely set all your fridges to defrost??
One possibility is that it’s maybe useful for the fleet operator to be able to remotely update firmware and the attacker used that.
The other, more likely, answer is that there’s a diagnostic mode that allows raw control of the system and no one bothered to require physical presence to enable service mode.
With remote firmware update capability, at attacker could easily brick the entire fleet. With just service access it could be possible but would be more complex.
I remember having to do this every few hours 25 years ago when working at a store part-time as a student.
Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.
15 years ago a retail chain i worked for had all their HVAC thermostats centrally managed by corporate. This isn't new and it is stupid but how else do you ensure shareholders keep every possible cent of profit (in the short term of course)
Alternative theory: Google's "mea culpa" on "misalignment incident" while testing the agents using their "next gen frontier model" is coming out in three... two... one...
> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
Wow, are you an optimist. The manufacturer has stated that they're past the period of security updates. And others... meaning the supermarkets? They outsource that. The people they outsource it to? Maybe they'll start paying attention to security.
Probably to inflict pain on the life of the voters so they can blame the government and manipulate the 2027 French presidential election in April. Maybe just a test.
Same as the high velocity train being sabotaged again just in the Spain national day. Hybrid war.
Come election day, do you really think many people's deciding factor would be a supermarket refrigerator incident from half a year ago? Especially considering that around the same time something far more... shall I say politically meaningful was happening at the same time, such as students protesting the lack of school funding?
This is just one in a thousand problems that will happen until that day. A high velocity train wagon was set on flames today, blocking the railway and creating chaos among thousands of passengers that try to return home after the holidays. Why?, because it makes the government look bad, and inflicts maximum pain on people, just when Spain is also about to celebrate elections. Angry people vote the loudest voices.
In France this benefits the pro-Russian Lepen's party with the "government is a disaster but we will make them pay for your suffering". Page "16" of the manual. In the end is all the same handbook all around the planet.
Just by the record, EU has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia so yes, they know. The more desperate grows Russia, the more this will happen. Until it will stop, suddenly, for no reason.
> Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
I wonder how many more decades of screaming into the void will be required for it to be taken seriously by those who deny any/all security efforts until after the disaster has already happened (and then still will only approve the absolute minimum required efforts)...
You can do that while gapping the actual fridge function. Network connected temp probe and dumb fridge. These sort of systems are used in lab setting where its all dumb fridges and freezers, and very precious things inside.
Yes it was more of a rhetorical question, e.g. maybe we need to rethink that whole idea of plugging everything into the internet and instead go back to air-gapped "local area networks".
It also wouldn't be a big deal when a supermarket employee makes an old-fashioned phone call (gasp!) to the refrigerator service company when some red light starts blinking ;)
While the app is beeping at them to pack more shelves, and they have already used up their only toilet break of the day to trying to stop the resourcing AI chatbot from putting them on triple shifts for the rest of the week.
The trained and retained supermarket employees are gone. The refrigeration service engineer has been replaced by an AI chatbot. We can't scale to qualified people running complex systems on remote air-gapped networks.
This is literally everything that's wrong with the modern tech industry in a nutshell:
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
They sell fricken refrigerators for God's sake. Maybe I can understand planned obsolescence for a cell phone, but a fridge? And especially to grocery stores that operate on razor thin margins to begin with, the idea that they'll just dump their old working refrigerators because the manufacturer refused security updates is a guaranteed recipe for stuff like this.
Danfoss are quoted as naming two systems, AK-SM800 and AK-SC355.
AK-SM800 looks like a current product. Danfoss have a PDF dated 2026.06 about it: https://assets.danfoss.com/documents/latest/590332/BC3376298.... This mentions "All new Electronics platform supporting new Operating System (based on Linux)", and specifically advises against connecting it to the internet.. Reading between the lines, especially section 10.5, it sounds like there was a major security revamp in 'release 4.0'. The article mentions "outdated firmware", so perhaps that refers to things before 4.0.
I haven't worked with supermarket control systems, so I only know what I've read in the PDFs, but it looks like this is not about throwing out entire fridges to update the control system. If you have the newer AK-SM800, it looks like the suggested action is to update firmware and follow instructions about keeping it well away from internet access. If you have the older AK-SC355, then keeping it away from the internet is even more important. Or, update to AK-SC355.
Ugh, this is even worse. The vuln was just disclosed a couple months ago, and so it was literally just a matter of time if not all systems were patched.
I can't for the life of me understand why these systems aren't air gapped, or at the very least network access is restricted to a small number of IPs or hardware keys.
I have to question why this control system was even in place.
I could see remote monitoring (of temps) and logging on the system (cycle time etc) but does one really need to control the defrost cycle? It's probably just a web interface on a single controller that used to be accessed by HVAC techs only.
> > "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
Because it's the EU I have to wonder if they will finally mandate that software go into escrow and be released if support stops.
Grocery stores do not use standalone refrigerators, I’m not sure why I have to keep repeating this fact when every single person has been in a grocery store and seen refrigerated cases that have a dozen or more doors.
They use cold cases and have rooftop or outdoor condensing units and evaporators inside of the cold cases/freezers/etc. There’s refrigerant piping running all over the place and there’s a bunch of sensors and relays that are automated to manage the refrigeration system.
My assumption is the Danfoss control system they’re using is EOL, it’s the grocer’s responsibility to upgrade their automation equipment if it’s unsupported.
No need to make assumption here, the article says it clearly:
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates". It said its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 fridge regulator systems were notably affected, with a version of the former using "outdated firmware". It added that it had long advised supermarkets to update from those models.
That being said I am curious what is typically the amount of time for software support offered on a newly released equipment and how common it is for super market to use obsolete software (especially for the part which carry some security risk like something with remote control). Also what about the insurance? Will they (fully) cover the financial loss? I don't know what is in their insurance contract and I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that using obsolete software make the supermarket responsible to some extent
> how common it is for super market to use obsolete software (especially for the part which carry some security risk like something with remote control).
It's a near guarantee.
I've been in dozens of power plants where the engineering workstations or operator interface terminals are running Windows XP or Windows 7. More than zero of which were not properly air-gapped. If those sites (with sizable CapEx budgets) delay upgrading for various reasons I would expect grocery store chains to keep whatever they have running until it's broken to the point of not being fixable without a complete overhaul.
> Physical access should be the only way to shut down a system like this.
Your opinion does not change the fact that virtually every automation system can be access remotely. It can be done safely with proper access controls.
That doesn't excuse them being controllable over the Internet. I can understand that remote monitoring is important, but it's in a supermarket. There's always going to be somebody on site who can control things locally. The telemetry can be transmitted via data diode, automatically re-transmitting on schedule so there's no need for any remote control.
> There's always going to be somebody on site who can control things locally.
No, there is not always someone onsite with the experience and knowledge to monitor and change the system. Grocery stores do not have staff refrigeration techs onsite, they contract that out.
> there is not always someone onsite with the experience
Big supermarkets long predate the invention of the Internet of Shit. Why do you have to talk about that like that's an inevitability that can't be fixed? the current situation was caused by your ilk of parasites. We used to know to how to maintain such things without remote control perfectly fine. There was no ubiquitous internet in the 80s.
There's always going to be a manager with access to keys. They get the HVAC tech on the phone and set the controls as instructed. They're still vulnerable to somebody scamming them into setting the controls wrong, but they at least have a chance of recognizing who they're talking to, and recognizing obviously crazy instructions (e.g. "turn the thermostat up to 50 degrees"). And even if they don't, the attack is a lot harder to scale with a human in the loop.
Then maybe companies should stop firing people with experience and knowledge. Maybe they served a purpose after all.
The family run supermarket I'm very familiar with that eventually was taken over by Hannaford absolutely had their own HVAC techs. Years ago at least.
You know what Hannaford did to that store after they bought it? They said that it would have to be a "smaller" store in their system, with less product diversity, fewer departments, less attention, less investment.
Do you know what that store was famous for, and why Hannaford placed it as the center of that deal? Because it did really really well, ran very profitably, and was essentially preferred by the (poor) community despite the Walmart 10 miles away. This store was so well run in the opinion of Hannaford Corporate, that they gave the former assistant manager, who had a working relationship with Hannaford for 20 years, priority over other internal applicants for high level management roles in order to get him to fix their problems at other stores. They lost another valuable manager due to that decision!
Their problems at another store were that it takes in $1 million a day but they refuse to pay more than local minimum wage to staff it. They struggled to keep that store staffed well, and this store in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the area looked like shit because stuff was never done.
Hannaford is currently seeing incredibly stiff competition from Market Basket and Costco. People who have trusted Hannaford (in the new england way where it means something) their entire lives are turncoating to Market Basket because why the hell not? It's just a store. They all suck. They can't compete on prices because distributors and upstream corporate behemoths set the prices. They can't compete on quality, because they buy that product from the exact same truck. The company explicitly has chosen to go the direction of competing on vibes of "Upmarket" product lines from the in house brand.
You know what Hannaford didn't do? Raise wages. You know what that Manager eventually did? He re-retired and gave up the good pay, good benefits, reliable and easy income to trade for being a physical laborer and building decks for rich people, because then nobody will be so stupid as to tell him to not do the things that he knows would improve things, and has the 40 year career to back it up. Hannaford had been courting him since the 90s, because that's literally how competent he was. This man went back to destroying his body, after a diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis, After a new Marriage, after economic uncertainty, because he literally wasn't allowed to be a good fucking manager of a business that he has known in his bones for decades. They didn't let him solve all their problems! Because either that would have affected how they want their profits to work, or because that's just how stupidly pig-headed and petty the modern Executive class is.
I understand you’re being sarcastic, but yes, eventually technology gets better so a manufacturer refreshes their product line. This is extremely common in many industries.
They do but they continue to service the old lines for quite a long time. This is not consumer grade equipment, it represents a large capital expense and also at stake is valuable inventory. The consumer "you're SOL when the warranty expires" approach won't fly.
"French supermarkets hacked because this is common in many industries". Maybe it should not be common? Maybe selling internet connected industrial plant means those things must be supported forever?
To not control any industrial processes remotely? I hope you realize that requiring that would make solar and wind farms completely non-viable, among many, many other things.
Leased lines, MPLS, custom routing setups, hell just a VPN that fails closed. There are so many options for doing this, all more secure that just slapping a device online behind whatever router the cheapest ISP gave you.
The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.
Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.
Seems like 95% of devices could be managed with a hardware filter that only allows through a handful of very rudimentary signals (more like Morse code than a full digital transmission), and then of course a properly designed on-device API that defines those signals and doesn't allow you to trigger a defrost remotely, when that should only ever be done with somebody physically present for example.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.
The point is having the digital transmission simple enough that you can use fully *physical* filters to discard everything but the 3-4 messages you need through. Of course it is still digital, but my point is, it is a physically enforced studied, safe subset and doesn't allow for full network access. There are of course a variety of ways to further firewall that, but something needs to act like as much of an air gap as possible while allowing for remote communications.
How do you authenticate such a system? 3-4 “quasi analog” messages seem incredibly easy to replay, if nothing else. If you need to depend on something actually cryptographic to make the system replay proof, you can just as well use that system for all aspects of access control. This makes no sense.
Well it would receive control signals from an on-site relay server with the hardware to communicate with it, and that would of course also be firewalled and use encryption to communicate with the outside world. That server could always in theory become compromised despite your best efforts, so the benefit is obvious: don't create even the theoretic possibility of being hacked by a class of message that should never exist.
The idea is not to solve everything with one simple trick, but to reduce the attack surface as much as possible in hardware. If you are dumb enough to make your 4 messages something like off, on, hard reset, random dangerous maintenance protocol, then it does nothing. If instead it encodes 4 useful and typically used states that can't destroy your system, then you have massively reduced the requirement for onsite, and accepted that more serious issues require onsite control.
Oh, so basically, reduce the vocabulary that can be communicated remotely compared to what's available locally? I can get behind that.
It's not an easy balance to strike, though; the less capable the remote interface is, the less useful it is. "Only completely harmless commands" might simply not be good enough. For example, is "deactivate electricity output of this solar panel" (e.g. because market conditions make it unprofitable to supply at a given instance) harmless or not? What about "increase supplied frequency by 0.01 Hz to stabilize the grid"?
I'm interested to know how many "legacy" controllers no longer patched by the manufacturer are operating solar and wind farms today.
If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.
That's funny, last I checked my fridge keeps food reliably cold with no internet connection, and most supermarkets have people around all the time to notice such a failure, a plan around such a failure, and expect to have such a failure periodically since fridges break down anyway.
Meanwhile you can use analog gauges if you need perfect max temperature monitoring.
That's what always pisses me off about this. Someone brought up "Hey, if we connect this to the internet to enable that feature, someone will start hacking fridges and hurting our customers, and I don't think the stupid page with a temperature graph on it is worth that tradeoff", and some ass told them to get over it and implement it.
Raymond Chen used to write about feature development at Microsoft, specifically how every single new feature idea started from a negative position, since it requires support and testing and engineering and thought, and has future repercussions, so it's often not a good idea to just add box checking features.
Microsoft believed this in the 90s. For things like UI functionality. That's the effort and thought and restraint required to have a consistent UI, for things to be thought out.
Somehow, between then and now, the industry threw all that thought away, and now everything has 400 totally unused, half implemented, utterly broken features.
Why are we here? "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.
Because they need remote monitoring. I have experience with HVAC so I'm guessing these are similar: typically outsourced to a third party, typically a VM running on a dedicated server, accessible by Citrix or something similar. Supermarkets don't internally staff fridge repairmen.
A lot of these devices are temperature controllable as the product in them may require different temperatures. They can have temperature ranges from refrigeration to freezing.
Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.
You can schedule power usage with a dummy controller. I'm not sure of any products sold that are that specific to temp in my grocery store at least. Either it is refrigerated or frozen.
Monitoring makes sense, but it feels like it makes no sense at all to allow that kind of remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves.
Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.
When, say, your internet craps out, would you rather your ISP try to resolve the problem, or schedule to send a tech out to your home before they start working on fixing the issue?
Groceries see HVAC in the same way. If they can get their issue addressed or diagnosed by their HVAC contractor without him having to schedule and physically travel to their site, they'd prefer him to solve/start solving the problem immediately. Time is money and the faster the tech can diagnose the problem, the faster he can get on fixing it.
And yes, the prevalence of these systems means that many HVAC techs have the ability to turn off their customers' air conditioners/fridges. They don't use it maliciously, because that would be actual suicide for their business.
---
Source: A close friend of mine runs an HVAC business (~8 employees) doing residential and commercial installs, repairs, and maintenance.
"That, like, costs money, man. The accounting department said there was a 1-in-100 year chance of this happening if we didn't shell out, so we didn't." - the CEO, probably.
A phone call from the HVAC company and physical thermostat dial (in a locked cabinet to prevent incompetent/malicious employees tampering with it) seems a safer solution.
Some grocery stores - and this is probably far more common in France - have no staff overnight.
I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.
They aren’t fridges, it’s a grocery store. You have obviously been in one, there are cases with a dozen doors that all open to the same cold case.
There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.
I shouldn’t need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.
Given the perfectly workable alternative of not having remote monitoring and simply having the store manager contact a repair tech on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is an issue, yeah I think actually you do need to justify the added complexity and expense of making this kind of mundane equipment internet accessible.
These systems only exist because those economics were decided decades ago. Issues are not exceptions in systems like this. They are huge, complex, and interface with the public.
The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.
Marketing. The restaurant industry doesn't have less skin in the game than grocery retailers re avoiding spoilage and net connected walk-in coolers and freezers are not a thing.
From my experience in a restaurant, those large commercial rooftop refrigeration/freezer units need attention several times a year. It's rare that your home fridge would have trouble that often but commercial units are more complicated and in a harsher environment. And supermarket installations are probably even more complicated.
Agreed. I was just addressing that it's not exceedingly rare to need to get a tech out on site to address something. Should the manager be on top of this, checking temps on all the cases every day? Absolutely, but I can see the argument for a more automated system of monitors/alarms that can get a tech dispatched before the manager has even noticed the problem.
My guess, its a service contractor type situation, like getting a smart meter. You can opt out, you just wont have power.
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Somebody wrote the software that is the interface between the fridge and the internet. And while it would be nice if HVAC technicians would remember to only make this software accessible via VPN, it is in fact possible to write software that is reachable from the internet while still being secure
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
Of course its "possible" for it to be secure, but the people involved are not experts.
The grocer likely has the least expertise.
The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
3 of the 4 companies could have all said to themselves "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws ? The grocer(s).
> Of course its "possible" for it to be secure, but the people involved are not experts.
They're selling network-accessible equipment so it's their duty to make it secure within some well-defined envelope. How's that any different from any other part of engineering and product development?
> "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws
Soon that will be the OEMs, per the EU Cyber Resilience Act [1]:
> Directive (EU) 2024/2853 [on liability for defective products] of the European Parliament and of the Council (16) is complementary to this Regulation. That Directive sets out liability rules for defective products so that injured persons can claim compensation when a damage has been caused by defective products. It establishes the principle that the manufacturer of a product is liable for damages caused by a lack of safety in their product irrespective of fault (strict liability). Where such a lack of safety consists in a lack of security updates after the placing on the market of the product, and this causes damage, the liability of the manufacturer could be triggered. Obligations for manufacturers that concern the provision of such security updates should be laid down in this Regulation.
Given the potential service contract nature of this particular situation, where the grocers signed a service agreement with HVAC companies, one would think the contract included clauses addressing this very situation, where a significant loss of inventory occurs. After all, the service being paid for is refrigeration.
With floor planning, the loss itself could be spread across multiple companies, under multiple insurance policies.
With that said, this particular hack could easily be a systems / networking "configuration error" and not any particular piece of softwares fault ( as in a bug, or hardcoded backdoor password. )
IoT platforms provided all the required functionality. Device provisioning (it is not easy to do identity on 'things'). MQTT for service-assisted communication where devices don't need to accept incoming connections. Over-the-air software updates. Over-the-air kernel security updates.
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
I just read the article again. It mentions "Danfoss" HVAC controls.
I happen to have a Danfoss HVAC controller here, and its controllable via Modbus. Its an older model, but its my understanding that larger HVAC systems commonly use Modbus.
Modbus systems are multi-drop serial, and the hack likely came in from the server side of one of the companies involved, and the HVAC controllers were all sent defrost commands. Thats my guess anyway.
I have a pump thats Modbus controllable as well, made by a company called Grundfos.
Modbus is the equivalent of VGA connector in displays and projectors. It does have a TCP/IP version as well, but it has no security whatsoever. Or any features besides reading/writing a 16-bit value (or a single bit, charmingly referred to as "coil")
Yes, that is likely. Although Danfoss seems to have their own controllers, I think that you are right, that the attack was not an 'Internet connected fridge', but an HVAC or FMS (Facilities Management System) that was connected to the fridges.
In the 2013 Target attack, the attackers used the HVAC contractors' credentials to gain access to Target's systems. The point of sale credit card terminals (what customers swiped cards and enter PINs) had no real security so the attackers were able to make those get "updates" from their own servers and download malware enabling them to get the magnetic stripe information as well as PIN (for debit cards). That year, I (like about 150,000,000 other people) got a brand new credit card with a new credit card number.
Newer PCI standards require much more secure customer-facing terminals and much more secure back-end systems so that much of this attack could not happen again.
Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
> While they may be known across the world as ‘French fries’, there’s nothing French about them. The name ‘friet’ comes from patates frites, Belgian-French for ‘fried potatoes’. One possible explanation for the association could have been formed in the First World War, when American soldiers were introduced to ‘fried potatoes’ in Belgium, but thought they were in France because that was the language spoken in that region. Whether you call them Flemish or Belgian, our delicious fries are made from bintje potatoes per tradition, and are the tastiest you’ll find anywhere on the planet.
Honestly, if you ever come to Cyprus and get good fries from the potatoes here, freshly cut and fried…
The Belgian fries have no leg to stand on, nothing. Sorry. Just my opinion :) but I’ve been a life long fries lover from Germany - and these beat out all other fries I had so far in Europe at least by a wide margin :P
I know it wasn’t your article but I wanted to spread this important knowledge to the world!!
It's probably a small drop compared to the overall amounts of wasted food. I guess the hope is that it will teach some people important lessons, like "your refrigerator shouldn't be connected to the Internet, and if it absolutely has to, take some time to consider security".
There's a marketing issue here that would need to be addressed first, namely the phrase "dumb appliance". That's a marketing slur that was intentionally propagated by manufacturers and it's bullshit. Few things seem more obviously stupid than the added complexity, expense, and security concerns associated with "smart appliances" especially given none of the features touted are critical to the appliance performing it's stated function.
https://x.com/intcyberdigest/status/2109753360282767451
So that's still a firmware issue indeed for me, no admin set voluntarly its password to current date.
The write-up in question: https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
> There's also a documented authentication bypass: sending a POST request to /xml.cgi can bypass the login entirely.
And they absolutely have equivalents.
Edit: TBF, they're ISO 27001 certified. Such cybersecurity! :P
https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/news/cf/danfoss-rei...
Never assume that having that certification means that shit is actually secure. It just means the company can do the audit dance.
Always leave an obvious-once-you-see-it, but minor, defect somewhere for the auditor to latch on to. One they can earmark for you to come up with a plan to address the issue before they grant you the certificate (and which you'll be able to write up in no time because you planned for it).
A good auditor and a company actually taking this stuff seriously can benefit from 27001. That probably accounts for 5% of all 27001 certifications out there.
If you're lucky you get an auditor who's just there along for the ride towards early retirement in a few years, and who'll joke with you and eat your lunch. Had one of those once. Doesn't help your security one bit of course, but it makes audit time more relaxed.
You still can do it, but it better be a super low level private network: basically a super low VPN/crypto without using any off-the-self kludge, open source or not, probably directly implemented in some hardware driver in assembly for machine code/hardware control (if traffic was "big", it would have been FPGAs, probably). And you ** _MUST_ ** have a permanent and significantly sized and competent "security" team 24/24 7/7 ** you can trust ** for monitoring and looking for "pertinent" flaws.
Mechanically, the effort required is some exponential of the machine code (compilers are a [trust] problem, not a solution) size, complexity and code unstability (change over time).
No, trusted compilers of comfy computer languages do not exist by definition, eat the bullet.
Related to crypto: I wish we had some open source binary specifications implemented in various ISAs for some micro-architectures. You want machine code here, not even C or whatever (or at best only for those binary specifications).
And don't be a fool, ASIC trust will be a thing: some features will have to be disabled, or you better be ready to change some micro-architecture, yes, would be better to have several micro-architectures based on the same ISA (i.e. RISC-V for zero IP lock) ready at proper scale.
Amazing
https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...
Could this be the same group? Or someone inspired by reading that article? Or just entirely unrelated?
In this case the question is, if US Army freezers were hacked earlier, why did nobody brief other operators of cooling equipment. Its a failure at the top! Everyone is getting flustered and knives are out.
But maybe they could not fix the underlying software or whatever and were not ready to share details without opening themselves up to more attacks. Also there are a lot of attacks happening all the time, which ones do you share?
If the psychological pressure at the top increases, more mistakes will be made. Sometimes mistakes can be subtle over or under reactions, sometimes the mistake is not to do anything. It is real effort to evaluate an appropriate response. For example, the military could reach out to commercial operators quicker, but then they have to handle all the comms, questions, and they also potentially leak more attack vectors. The commercials also start having this overhead of having to read emails from the military and internally those orgs have to deal with that overhead in comms to evaluate the seriousness.
This is a problem, because very few orgs have spare capacity for this stuff and so they have a choice. They can react to the military comms and risk mistakes somewhere else due to comms / management bottlenecks, or vice versa. There are only bad choices. And every time this happens, another choice has to be made.
Lots of these will be low-level attacks with manageable impact, which lowers the alertness over time, until that moment when something serious happens. If at point everyone is exhausted a real costly mistake will happen. Its the long game.
In this case, I am sure a consideration was that the attack was already used against high-profile cases and it makes sense to just use the attack vector more broadly before it gets closed.
I agree that they had a firmware update, but unless they had the operational capacity to update the checks notes freezers of all their customers, that is not a fix. The theoretical and technological aspects of solving a problem are often the easy parts.
It's like if NASA would claim to have a fix for the Opportunity rover on mars to get it operational again. All they need to do is to replace the batteries. Well, that is not a fix if there is no way to actually replace the batteries in practice.
I don't see why the existence of a firmware update would remove the culpability of negligence from the hardware manufacturer.
Wait, it has its own cellular modem? Nevermind, then.
Okay, let me explain why this is wrong. This will be an imperfect example, but hopefully it gets the point across.
When you shut down the refrigerators and freezers of something like 700 stores, people notice. They go to get food that day, and there is nothing fresh. Nothing. Go to the next store, still no fresh or frozen food.
Was there a natural disaster? No. Was there an attack? Yes, but the attacker is unknown. But who was in charge? Who was supposed to prevent this? They remember.
It's getting colder outside in the North, fall is here. This is traditionally a time where a lot of people were, for thousands and thousands of years, stocking up food and doing final harvests to survive the long winter.
If suddenly hundreds of stores don't have fresh food across the country, that is a large impact. Not even just what happened, but what could happen. If it happened to these hundreds of stores, what about thousands? What about other types of stores? What about other types of attacks? And your brain starts thinking about the other possible type of things that might be able to be fucked with remotely. The fear sets in. People that are afraid make less rational decisions. Maybe they also decide the current people in political power aren't fit for task, because they can't keep them safe. Maybe this didn't happen under the other guys.
Meanwhile, millions of dollars of food was just wasted. Not only that, but it also has to be disposed of. Because it's such a large amount of food, it will take additional trips from the trash disposal service. They may even bring people in on overtime across the country. The people at the stores themselves will probably work extra hours, quickly trying to rotate the bad food out and hopefully (now if not soon) get the new food in. In addition, the food logistics network has to get additional shipments of food it wasn't expecting to transport to hundreds of stores. That's a lot of extra time on the road, a lot of extra wear on equipment. It also stresses the food supply and production itself.
So I don't know what "doesn't have any real impact" looks like to you, but to summarize, this is going to do millions of dollars of economic and political damage, and contributes to social upheaval. It probably cost next to nothing to actually attack.
(This is also right out of Russia's hybrid war playbook against Europe. Russia just sank a Bulgarian tanker btw: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmn06w5x9g25o )
I read the comment as being a satirical way of voicing critique.
France has presidential elections coming up next year, and growing civil unrest is happening. Cyber attacks are routine, and several have been officially attributed to Russia.
Anything that can trigger fear can elicit irrational reactions. That has been a known propaganda tool since forever.
> Every society is three meals away from revolution.
So I wouldn't entirely handwave it away.
Remember lots of Russian tactics is pretending they can do a lot of bad stuff if people don’t do what they want. “Stop helping Ukraine or we will nuke you”.
Also USA has been pinning every single cyber attack on Russia/Iran/NK/China for several years, and I am personally very doubtful that western countries do not run ransomwares. In any case the result is that everyone thinks those countries do have the capability to do this.
Which their leadership never fails to mention when we (the EU) goes past some imaginary red line.
There are no red lines. There is only drone war and making Russia regret that they are attacking our allies.
Possibly, but I bet most of their nuclear stockpile hasn't been kept maintained and it wouldn't surprise me if parts of it had been stolen to be sold. This is why Putin threatens a nuclear attack, but doesn't do it as there's a good chance it would show how many duds they have (also setting off nukes would likely force a response from other countries).
No, the reason is that he's not completely insane and doesn't want to cause a nuclear war as you seem to presume.
Remember that USA had the "strike first" doctrine that the eastern block never had.
Russia had (has? I don't think it works) an interesting counter system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand (Dead Hand, aka Perimeter)
There are - in addition to that - examples of Russian financing and influence operations alongside this. Take for example France’s Front National that received a €9.4 million loan from the First Czech Russian Bank in 2014. Separately, the US DOJ’s 2024 Doppelganger case alleged a Kremlin-directed operation using fake news sites and social-media accounts to influence elections and weaken support for Ukraine.
Those are different mechanisms, but they illustrate why the damage from an influence campaign cannot be measured solely in immediate economic losses. My concern is the feedback loop: disruption creates grievances, propaganda amplifies them, and political actors can turn those grievances into support.
That does not establish who was behind this particular refrigerator attack. Attribution still needs evidence. But “the direct damage was small” is not enough to conclude that an operation has no strategic value.
So agree with you. Just more shit flooding the zone.
Btw. there is also a separate interesting stream if one asks the question about wealthy technology investors’ attitudes toward democratic constraints.
Like Peter Thiel explicitly wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
My concern is that concentrated private power and foreign interference can both weaken democratic accountability, even when their motives differ. The results are a win for both by weakening democracy.
In Poland there were arson attacks on malls - https://warszawa.tvp.pl/95886809/pozar-marywilskiej-44-ruszy...
They also attempted to derail passenger trains - https://www.rp.pl/kraj/art43362151-rzecz-w-tym-sabotaz-na-to...
They used drones to block airports across Europe (I ended with overnight stay after they attacked Eindhoven) - this one has no direct proof, but it was obviously Russia.
Russia used list of hospitals in Syria. As bombing target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93Syrian_hospita... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/world/middleeast/russia-b...
When Armenia complained about poor performance of Russian weapons video of one of attacks was released as proof that weapons are fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
"Russia has never hatched, is not hatching and will never hatch any plans to attack anyone," he stressed. "Russia is a peaceful country, which is interested in good relations with its neighbors." -- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
---------
that is just recent, if you look for older then say Beria is case where accurate depiction would be criticized as not realistic and ridiculous
Completely untrue.
People going to the store to get food that day remember.
Recall Trump's regime refused at one point to sell weapons to Ukraine.
Continually undermining the leader of a country who's defence prevents Putin's expansion and further war in Europe ... it's not 'discord' it's absolute treachery.
Russia's idea of hybrid warfare means doing things like dragging anchors across internet cables and paying people to firebomb warehouses and businesses.
- they either didn't warn their customers this was a critical security patch, - many of these fridges/freezers were directly accessible on the internet with their own 3G/4F SIM cards without further protection!
Crazy stuff
[0] https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
I have no idea how complex or difficult it is to flash the hardware on these refrigerators, but they had 10+ weeks to do it. This feels like a missed opportunity.
Are there any HN readers here that work in IT for any big supermarkets in France? Did you own this kit or similar, and what is the regular firmware update cycle/process?
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/6908a0ce-ffdd-4ea9-b376-d35d36263...
[1] https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
[2] https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/coordinated-v...
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
maybe groups have been looking for targets to use it on?
Three french supermarket chains had their refrigeration systems hacked.
Separately, a super market chain serving Belgium and the Netherlands shut down a large chunk of their IT systems due to a "cybersecurity incident", primarily affecting distribution centers and grocery delivery services. But the supermarkets are currently open, and do not have refrigeration issues.
Suspicious timing and these incident could well be related, but that has not been reported so far.
It could well be one ransomware attack on Ahold Delhaize, and an unrelated attack on a refrigeration supplier. Note that a similar refrigeration attack happened happened to a number of US military installations a few weeks ago.
These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage. One example might be that due to shifting customer patterns and products, you might want a certain refrigerator case to be kept colder with a narrower temperature range. Another example is for Demand Response: when a brownout may occur, the utility companies want people to lower their load, which, in the case of supermarkets, means turning off lights, increasing the thermostat on the AC, turning off dehumidifiers, etc.
One notable story from that time: this was during the 2008 economic crash, and the company went from hiring to laying off within a week. A group of technicians were working on a refrigerator compressor system and were told by security to stop what they were doing and immediately exit the building. They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
If your network isn't air gapped, then it's vulnerable, and attackers will side step the "read only" path to affect control system changes.
It can be implemented with a fiber optics cable with only the transmitter on the secure side, a laser+photo cell for real air gap, cutting the rx cable in a rs232 or having a microcontroller with an output pin connected to another controllers input pin. By handling it with hardware instead of software you get a very secure partition between the trusted and untrusted side.
It's used to monitor for example industrial systems and power plants.
Wikipedia calls it unidirectional network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
The most straightforward way to make a fridge with control over Ethernet is to slap on a 5-10 years old industrial temperature control product and wire up sensors and actuators onto it. In such cases, the industrial system that would be now 25 years by now would be running some cumulative 35 years old RTOS and Claude is going to find out it has bunch of basic buffer overflows that can make the fridge explode if exploited.
You can't drive my car simply by pointing a webcam on the steering wheel.
My position is that if there's any connection, of any practical type, between the control system and the outside world, an attacker will be able to find ways to break things.
Even if it just boils down to "an attacker made our dashboards report numbers wrong and so we closed a valve to prevent an issue that didn't exist, and inadvertently destroyed our own product", the outcome is the same.
I would be much more worried about the human element of technology development. Namely that having a web based interface which shows data, but can’t change anything would feel unnatural. I can totaly imagine that you make the choice, implement it correctly. you have your website only showing things but unable to make changes.
A day later a product person asks for the ability to set the temperature on the web interface. You kindly and patiently explain to them that due to safety reasons you can’t implement that feature. They will understand and nod.
A month later one of the execs asks for a similar feature. They might also present the feature as mission critical, or even package it in the language of safety. After all customer X just lost so much money because we couldn’t do this one simple thing via the web interface. You argue with them and your viewpoint eventually wins. But it is a bit hard to argue because you ultimately have to argue that you / your team cannot be trusted to implement the feature safely. So you have to make it sound like you are both competent enough to be trusted with this hard decision and incompetent at making things secure enough the same time. A hard sell. But you win somehow.
Then a month later there is a hackathon. And one of the new hires puts together this amazingly looking new product UI. Everyone is amazed it is genuenly a delight to use. But it completely ignores the data diode principles. You have to kick it into the long grass, or modify it so much that it is barelly recognisable.
Then a month later a new product development start. Your company is hoping to conquer some new vertical, and need to make a cheaper version of the product. So an electrical engineer is tasked to cost optimise the control unit. They correctly point it out that we could reduce the BOM cost by more than half if only we got rid of the data diode and the second set of microcontroller. You have to argue the safety case. People nod. But you are loosing more and more “political capital”. Upper management asks you to work with the EE on how you can maintain the safety while also cutting cost. You know that this won’t be easy and the savings won’t be as much.
And so on and so on. So even if the company implements such data diode, and implements it correctly and safely. Future product and business pressures will work against it. Realistically you are not going to win every single argument about it. One day you will come back from a holiday and there will be someone who circumvented it either because they didn’t know better, or didn’t believe that they cannot be trusted to make the circumvention safe enough. It is a people problem, not a tech problem. If there is even such a distinction.
Temperature sensor is a sensor. Refrigeration compressor motor is an actuator.
GPS positioning of a car is a sensor. Motor to turn the wheel is an actuator.
Aircraft altimeter is a sensor. Motors to control control surfaces are actuators.
And so on.
Some devices are sensors, like temperature sensors. It's not that they're "read only", it's that... You can't override temperature. For that, you need other devices. Like a switch to a motor that operates refrigeration compressor. That would be an actuator. If you put the data from the sensor online, the worst case scenario is someone unauthorized gets your data. If you build interface to control an actuator online... You can read the article up top.
The problem is that all major cloud providers (AWS and Azure for sure, and I'm sure Google as well) have a large number of services targeting IoT devices, both to read and control. So default architectural decision is "We'll just plug these into AWS IoT, it's secure, reliable, highly available, and has all the features we need, all we have to do is to configure what we want and we're all set". Which in reality is not that secure just because of how IoT is designed. But AWS/Azure obviously push for these solutions because it gives them more revenue.
It’s a very low margin business if you don’t work efficiently you’ll get outcompeted by people who do like Aldi/ Trader Joe’s etc
heh, the Czech supermarket cartel would like to speak to you.
Most of the HVAC based control system changes are about saving energy, not labor.
or find any exposed Ethernet slot and slide your device in it.
most of the time it will work and you will get an inside access.
publicly available retail stores require multiple layers of defense across the L7 stack
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
I understand why it's beneficial to have these systems connected to a network. You have not explained why that network has to be the Internet, and TFA is one reason why it shouldn't be.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.
https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around €7,000 [1]. So this is hardly the typical dirt-cheap IoT device you can buy for a few bucks from China. The product label also says "Made in Denmark."
This vulnerability certainly appears more complex to exploit than the ones routinely found in cheap IoT devices.
Still, I wonder why, in the age of Tailscale and Nebula, a large company like Danfoss doesn’t use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
[1] https://www.lefroid.fr/fr/c/p/402785
That label only means most of the final assembly process have been completed in Denmark, it doesn't mean all HW & firmware inside of it have been developed in Denmark by vikings.
A lot of HW & FW by EU companies whose main specialty isn't HW and FW, tends to be outsourced to third party consultancies (sometimes even offshored), who won the bid to do it as cheap as possible, so you never know what quality you're gonna get inside of it, despite the provenance label.
One of the biggest scams right now is the Made in Germany label on cars/household appliances, which isn't in any way an indicator of quality like it used to be.
As others have pointed out, this interface is intended for use by service personnel.
My point is simply that situations like this can be prevented in several ways: on the customers side, if they have a capable IT department, or on the vendors side, by designing with the expectation that some customers will inevitably expose devices to the internet, regardless of what the manuals and training materials say.
It seems that some of the newer lab machines require internet access because you can't run lab tests unless you have a paid subscription to use the machine. No credits on the subscription, no tests.
I mention this b/c a lot of commenters here are saying "but why would you ever hook up a freezer to the internet??"
I find that type of comment fascinating as many of the people on HN worked for firms that built the technology required to use internet based subscription models.
This is because, in some cases, the machine is actually rented or leased and the maintenance and supply costs are charged based on usage rather than as capex. Maintaining these machines is not cheap, especially calibration and testing.
And I hope we all start calling these people out more for what they've done. I've worked in tech a long time but I would never contribute to something like this.
I doubt their security is all that good.
Of course, the reality is more likely that the hospital still has to buy things and the subscription is a net loss on top of that so patients (or the people paying for the care) are screwed twice.
Even if the TCO for the clinic were exactly the same over X number of years, the manufacturer that sells subscriptions still comes out ahead because they're effectively in the financing business, too. Why tell a customer to go borrow money from somebody else when you can make them borrow from you?
There are two reasons to use subscription pricing:
1) Price discrimination: You want to charge a large customer more for the same device
2) Lowering the capital expenditure by hiding the true price in operating costs
You could argue that (1) is good for small clinics, because they get access to the same machines as big clinics for a smaller cost. But I believe it's just a way to remove opportunities for competitors and results in everyone paying higher prices, even smaller clinics.
Disrupt the internet and good luck getting your emergent studies read by doctors who don’t look at anything to do with the scans and X-rays they order other than the Radiologists report.
In a crisis, the surgeons will do the radiology. And they will bitch about it, but it will get done.
I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".
Connectivity in these environments is often challenging, it isn't like connecting a consumer fridge to wifi. Sometimes you are bridging weird networks that multiple parties need access to. It should be secure but that isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Many of these systems have very long lives, so there are many limitations that reflect the technology that existed when they were built.
All of this is invisible to the average person but it is what makes the world work.
I think the entire supply chain is making sure it has maximum profits extractable by law and any other emergent phenomena you observe is serendipitous and probably temporary, damaged or dropped as soon as the regulatory environment or marketplace changes to allow another dime of profit.
Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.
AKA, the decade where everyone bought way too much into the 'Just do JIT supply chain for the manufacturing location to warehouse tail and pretend we are Amazon' bullshit.
I put it that way because it is short-sighted to not consider that transportation costs will always increase over time (i.e. fuel prices, wages of drivers) and shipping a final product over that long of a distance (i.e. at least half of the country, and instead of shipping grain to process it is finished boxes which is less efficient for volume) and yet they made that choice.
Where it got nasty is that when the average consumer base decided it was fine to pay dealer markups on cars because of the parts issues that industry saw from their JIT shortsights, everyone saw dollar signs instead of a problem to fix.
I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.
If only…
Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.
Or "Your reefer is set to 35 degrees but you're hauling chilled beer, we set it to 40 degrees to save fuel"
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.
You need to save labor somewhere to free it up for other jobs that give you technological progress. If everyone would still be occupied plowing fields with oxen, we wouldn’t have cars and computers now.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
The perspective of resiliency and how much will you lose if things go wrong seems kinda… new?
Funny that it should happen in France which has been at the forefront of European self resilience.
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/fix-and-troub...
They highlight connection through a firewall, mention secure remote access methods, monitoring for data breaches, strong access controls, etc. Reasonable, but these are just recommendations, so the stores could have followed all of them or none at all.
An article about Danfoss vulnerabilities mentioned in a different comment (https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...) says
> we searched publicly available internet-wide scanning platforms, including Shodan and Censys, for signatures associated with its management interface. It didn't take long to find what we were looking for. Numerous controllers [2765] were directly accessible from the public Internet.
So none at all is a possibility.
... And then the customer demands it be turned off, and the customer is always right...
Though I'm afraid things are getting worse, or at least it looked so a few years ago, back when I worked in this space. The hot thing in IIoT / Industry 4.0 was basically taking all webshit technologies and deploying them on industrial hardware, to "leverage mature innovation and OSS ecosystem" or such nonsense. The problem (one of many) being, once the engineers were done trimming excessive security measures that negatively impacted safety, they were still left with node.js running on industrial controllers, now even less secure in general than it was originally.
Did you know that buildings have doors that cannot be locked to prevent them from being opened from inside, because otherwise in case of a fire (or in the US, active shooter), people will die if they cannot exit the building?
Did you know that many industrial plants intentionally disable certificate revocation checks, because having a certificate expire on you for whatever reason is a sure-fire way to break the plant (and in some case possibly kill people), and overall a nuisance when trying to keep the plant running, while the threat it protects against can be handled elsewhere in the stack?
Security and safety are very often at odds - not just in emergency, but during regular operations.
So you can find one, log in, and have a look for yourself.
You shouldn't.
But you can.
But you shouldn't. Okay? Don't.
I have been in meetings were the Data Security Officer refused to sign off on specific projects, without having a proper pentesting report in place, for example.
Because legally it would be their responsibility, if something would happen.
Did everyone forget about Therac-25?
For the latter I would imagine you could have a short (maybe a month) logging period where you connect the fridges and collect data and then comeup with some offline system to manage them generally for better efficiency. You could even have a test group or single fridge that you keep connected to the internet for future data points (like in case of a giant heatwave or something)
Lets combine some testy topics: will LLMs make this any better? On the one hand, if it's easy for fridge manufacturers to churn out code, will the slop create enough cracks in the icemaker to sail the titanic through? Or will the lower barrier to pretty good security agents get more security into the IoT field (assuming it's taken advantage of?) Or will it not matter because the store manager will just set the web portal password to 123456?
- Cheapest possible test-passing AI generated code with minimal check-box style security audit.
- Looser and broader definitions and greater penalties for hacking.
So we spill cold air on the floor and heat the place with AC, then talk about low margins and having to save energy costs. Does anyone see the issue?
> how it affects customer purchase decisions.
If nobody wastes energy in a stupid way like this, what changes? Are they no longer buying cold things? So what, then you sell more of the stuff that doesn't need refrigeration.
If there were two identical supermarkets, and one had running taps, and the other turned off their taps after using them, and paid their employes 5cents more a month, I would shop in the second one. But I can't, I don't get the choice, because a bunch of bunch of marketing people convinced someone to get an "edge" over the competition, and then told everybody else they have to, too, or they'll FaLL BeHiND. Kick those grifters to the curb and you'll save even more.
Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.
If you home refrigerator could be defrosted remotely, in what scenario would you ever do that?
Every now and then our customers ask if we can add remote control for specific parameters but we've always turned them down, citing liability reasons.
Re: legacy Danfoss systems such as AKM, 720 and 850 there is no way to have read-only access (for different reasons in each case). I haven't been able to find weaknesses in the new 800A yet, but that's only because I have not had to try yet.
The article is dated August 2026. Synacktiv (a different company) reported the very same vulnerability for older system managers/controllers already in 2023. Their report[1] says Danfoss told the products are EOL and should be upgraded. At no point did Danfoss fix the same issue in 800A. Typical.
Back in 2016 when we were integrating their 850 series system managers we encountered an issue with the HTTP API returning 400 series errors over slow links. We sent them PoC code written in Python 3. One month later they sent us an email, complaining that they first had to backport the PoC code to Python 2.7 as that was the newest version they could install. They also attached a "fixed" PoC code snipped where they had removed the artificial delays that did not trigger the issue. Danfoss never did anything to actively fix the issue.
One year later I browsed changelogs for the commercial RTOS that Danfoss used and realized the issue was fixed upstream in 2010 or 2011. That means their AK-SM 850 had at least six years worth of unfixed bugs.
[1] https://www.synacktiv.com/sites/default/files/2023-10/synack... (despite saying SM800, the firmware in question is for AK-SM 850)
Edit: The parent commenter seems to work at Danfoss on their Leanheat platform.
I worked with district heating, no idea what the cooling guys are/were doing. It's a big company.
Why don't they just--- no margin. But there were CVEs-- no margin.
The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class has nothing in terms of luxuries like security reviews and gear replaced on cycles and other basics taken for granted.
But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
Secure-by-default laws will eventually help, but there's always going to be groaning infrastructure particularly in commodity industries, and we still haven't onboarded most of the disaffected men to the Internet that will commit innumerable more hacks and disruptions.
I think it's more than this. Industrial control system upgrades are serious business and (at least if you're doing them properly) require a lot of planning and consideration. Particularly when the subsystem being replaced is decades old already.
I think the overwhelming majority of people (including on hn) have no understanding of how complex industrial systems are - even as-built, but particularly after decades of evolution. Doing proper engineering in these spaces is expensive.
You can reasonably blame supermarket chains for being insecure, but we certainly aren't currently enabling them (or anybody else) when it comes to fixing these issues.
In before "but insurance"; yes insurance can in theory mitigate some of this, but I feel like people on HN have no understanding what it's like to deal with a multi-million dollar insurance claim that the insurance company 100% does not want to pay out. The legal battles over such things take years and are on their own incredibly expensive.
They usually think in projects. Some project manager, some funds and some workers are assigned to a specific project. And than this project is followed through. Eventually the project is done (finished or dismissed). And all the allocation shifts to the next project.
This is e.g. the reason why most of the Android phones have so bad security. Even Qualcomm does the Android stuff on their chips only project wise. Is the project done, then you'll get an Linux kernel from 2021 with this specific device. There will never be an update, even if this outdated Linux kernel has 20 known CVEs. The reason is simple: no PM allocated, no funds allocated, no workers allocated.
And such project-thinking also exists for other hardware chips, e.g. network or WIFI chips. Lots of development to get the thing "ready to market" --- which isn't necessarily to get it good --- and then almost nothing.
And this is the hardware the industry automation uses. Except that there some intermediaries in between, e.g. Kontron that make industry-grade boards. But even at that level you have the project structure. These boards are then used by the manufacturers of the industry automation which, who would have thought it, also mostly think in projects.
And this is the reason why the S in IoT stands for security.
People at various levels would need to switch to a process mode, away from project mode. And people at various management levels need find a way on how to sustain this financially.
It happened once. Did you do the maths here? Can you tell us which one was Kore expensive and what percentage chance there was of this hack happening?
This happens all the time. Unfortunately, in my experience, most of the risk acceptance happens without even really believing in the cost of the risk, and people just accept everything. it is highly likely someone like that accepted this.
Management is never held accountable.
By whom and for what?
The problem with security maximalist[0] ideology is that it does not accept reality for what it is: shit will happen. The correct way to handle risks is to mitigate them to some extent, and then insure (or self-insure) against the risk that remains[1].
Then, when the risk actually materializes and mitigations prove insufficient, you write off the damage and carry on with your day - and yes, perhaps even reward the executives who set up mitigations and insurance that allowed the business operations to continue undisturbed.
Only then, mitigations MAY be upgraded and insurance premiums adjusted, as an event happening is an important new evidence in risk estimate for it happening again.
That's how adults in the room handle security.
It's only the general public and cybersecurity people who see random events happening and decry that somehow it affects them and Somebody Needs To Be Accountable, and Someone Must Do Something About It.
--
[0] - Or should I say, cybersecurity maximalist, because in every other field except software, this is well understood.
[1] - Talking about regular security, that applies to 99.99%+ of businesses; the risk to life and limb is a special case with extra considerations, though it fundamentally doesn't change much about the framework.
And that's even assuming anyone who runs these sorts of systems have "hacked to turn on defrost mode" on their bingo cards at all, which probably isn't the case.
On top of that, upgrades carry risks of their own!
Nowadays you can be pretty certain it will be exploited.
It is not just run faster than slowest guy to get away from the bear, now it is dozens of bears per runner and bears are stupid enough to chew on anything but also smart enough once they bite something tasty that works will just continue biting that.
Now that we see large scale incidents will there be an actual money value associated with upgrading systems and security for supermarket appliances.
Something that might not be obvious, but temporary dips in temperatures also need to be monitored as it's enough to spoil the food. Worse case scenario isn't to have to throw 50~100 kilos of food, it's to have spoiled food still looking fine and consumers ending at the ER, with the whole franchise name on the news.
> My freezer at home
That can't be your frame of reference for a business entity part of a franchise.
so the expensea are related not to amount of adversaries but to amount of things you need to protect. because its enough to have one bad guy to inpose expenses on whole village.
Russia is feeling the pain of having their warehouses blown up.
There will be tons of budget for having things ‘blow up’ themselves.
I may not have experience, but it is standard security practices that monitoring and control must live in separate channels for security. This is not a "planning and consideration" concern, this is conceptual design of systems.
A supermarket may have 30 freezers. You don't want them to beep loudly if someone forgot to close the door. Instead you connect them to a central monitor. A local employee can see on the monitor which freezer has a problem and go see the issue.
The monitoring is as well a proof that the cold chain was kept.
This network was local to the market. Then one day it was found better to collect these data to a modern dashboard, and so the local network ends on corporate network.
Why not? It works as an alarm, is simple in design and requires no external input.
They need to be checked 3x per day anyway for temperature so someone will notice eventually. And checking temperature must be product core temp so no remote monitoring. Unless haccp changed massively over the last 20 years to "we don't care anymore".
It's far less work than touching anything on controller side (at most changing some network settings) and requires attacker to at the very least penetrate your network perimeter and snoop around to find it rather than "run nmap on a controller's default port over country's IP range"
No profit in security/dependency upgrades. Propriety SCADA protocols to enforce full stack manufacturer lock in.
It sounds dramatic but every update or change to the system rocks the boat and exposes it to a whole new tranche of dangers. So we spend most of our time observing. There's no such thing as a casual QoL update in SCADA.
Most SCADA systems date from the 1970s and a lot of them don’t really think about network security or even have a concept of it. So, they don’t think about the consequences of connecting it to the Internet for remote access. It’s just a feature they want.
> So, they don’t think about the consequences of connecting it to the Internet for remote access. It’s just a feature they want.
This is the disconnect that's so confusing.
In 2017 I was hired at a place to support their ERP system and regular SysAdmin work. My first month was the last patch for their 10 year old ERP system. That was key software running the entire company and it was deployed before I finished middle school. The floor was run of scanners using WinME terminals that lost config on power loss.
That business is still profitable. I did not stay long.
You can use a modern operating system just fine.
The guys deploying the new system ($2 million for a single location) are having HVAC schlubs terminate CAT5E and leave the gateway controller just hanging, unmounted to the wall or anything. Lo and behold, the RJ45 port has been broken and you have to send me a new gateway.
All the replacement controllers (for a system that is supposed to be better than Danfoss) are being set to 192.168.0.x. Each individual device, based on the "technician" descriptions are running individual DHCP servers inside them. And they just deploy them, no asking IT about approval or correct network config, just deploy and then make it our problem on a random day when they realize nothing is talking to each other.
They are just now in the late 2020s realizing what a VPS with an API is - truly, nothing to worry about with baby's first public IP address when baby doesn't understand what the implications of multiple DHCP servers on a single network might be.
The people "designing" and deploying these systems are HVAC guys with a little bit of software and networking knowledge. The networking (and security lmao) are the lowest priority part of what they're doing, they're more concerned with crimping pipe and moving onto the next project.
The people doing the project management and buying decisions are likely not IT at most operations, but the Facilities guys, and they'll slap a microcontroller anywhere until IT catches them or tells them they can't do what they want as easily as they'd like. There are no security reviews before deployment because the people heading the project don't even know what security is if it isn't petty theft and they don't want to hear that it will take longer than the contractor is promising them.
For additional context here, given everyone talking about the tightness of margins in retail grocery, until 6 months ago our network backbone switches in an environment where we need true on=prem servers to run operations, were still 10/100 Cisco Catalyst 2000s. Previous generations had fucked up the networking so hard with such little documentation and wacky misunderstandings that it took me several years to unfuck bits and pieces slowly and then schedule an actual maintenance window (because those mean potential lost sales, can't do that!) to cutover the rest to a more reasonable series of 1Gbps switches. We do mid 8 figures in a single location and I had to go through an entire song and dance to get budget approval for scheduling the 4 hours of OT for my sysadmin to do a maintenance window with me at midnight. Granted, we post mid 5 figures in actual net income most years, so yeah, margins are incredibly tight for smaller players and those of us actually trying to do a good job in any of the different sectors of the business are constantly trying to fix messes that wouldn't exist if there'd been better understanding or honesty about the long term costs of short term savings.
In any case, I'm sure there are more business segments out there like grocery HVAC where the networking is a simple means-to-an-end and the people deploying these networks barely understand the depths of the waters they're swimming in. There is absolutely a need to coordinate all the constituent subsystems to keep inventory stable until it sells, but yeah, if I'd even have been in the room during decision time with the contractors I'd have shot down any plan with external access without very precise deployment specs and plans. But I wasn't, I'm just the guy finding out some just certified HVAC chucklefuck is deploying DHCP bombs on my network 4 months into their contract and thinking they're doing me a favor. Without a doubt, a sufficiently informed and motivated attacker could knock out many SMBs that don't have a suitably knowledgeable IT department or god forbid an MSP charging them extortion rates for little real value.
Really love that I'm finding out our current HVAC system is getting exploited in France and at US Army bases on the first day of my vacation. Honestly think my only winning move here is to either buy a completely separate ISP ingress for the HVAC system or set a new subnet with only enough address space for the handful of microcontrollers needed for this new system. Time to start pushing on when the Danfoss is being retired and with how much gusto.
Their only chance would have been if appliance companies wouldn't be dumb enough to put a simple refrigerator on the public internet in the first place.
I know one German retailer from their storage warehouse point of view (not from the actual stores!). I made the operating system of fork lift terminals and visited quite a lot of their warehouses. And inside their warehouse there is zero connection possible to the internet, they are completely shielded. Their firewall ONLY allows connection to their (locally running) warehouse software.
A warehouse usually have LOTS of outdated equipment, security wise. Barcode label printers 15+ years without any firmware update. Voice dictation systems based on Windows XP. Things like that ... but as they closed down any contact to and from these systems to the outside, this is of little interest to them.
(I can see the need for remote monitoring, that the freezer actually worked. Controlling the temperature is the issue.)
It’s hard running that type of network securely, and costly to run it alongside a normal internet connection.
Cheaper to just use the internet connection and squint a bit at ‘securely’.
Could the same thing be done with SMTP way more securely than opening up your firewall to some random AWS EC2 instance? Yeah no doubt.
Do you think grocery retail execs actually understand computers past Microsoft Word and Excel? I report to one, they can barely listen to me say the word WAN failover.
Like all things in IT, experience is the best teacher. Organizations will fail to invest in their technology, security included, and only then will the execs start to trust that the wizards in the backroom are telling them truths instead of asking for new toys - if they're lucky enough to still be the same exec that heard they should take security seriously before the Bad Thing happened.
Even in that case there is zero reason for the devices to be reachable from outside the network rather than the devices reaching out to known hosts only.
Very likely they were sold on these internet-connected systems without being told about the drawbacks, which is sad.
I'm catching issues as I can as the head of IT at an org replacing our Danfoss systems with something else, but it wasn't until about 1.5 years since the initial decision to replace them that I'm finding out from a sub-contractor of the contractor that there's a cloud app our HVAC network will need to talk to - which is not-so-funnily enough a requirement by the state for us to receive associated grant funding for a portion of the new system cost. This was never mentioned to me at all as the head of IT. It's not even a convenience vs security issue, it's a misaligned corporate communications and approval channels issue. In other words, the capacity to secure your technical systems is downstream of political organization.
It’s more costly to do it properly, so most don’t.
Then there is refrigerant leak detection, and automated calls and remote troubleshooting for the refrigeration vendor.
But since we've already got off-site access, why not throw in temperature controls so you can implement demand-based setpoints, schedules, and so the corporate facilities and product quality teams can keep an eye on things. They are required to keep detailed logs of each refrigerated space after all.
Any vendor selling grocery equipment without network communication is going to have a hard time staying in business.
I've no idea what they ended up doing after that.
Intermarché - €44.5bn revenue (2024)
Cooperative U - €28.35bn revenue (2025)
These aren't struggling grocery stores. They are massive businesses collectively running several thousand stores and employing hundreds of thousands of people. They have IT departments.
The post I replied to (currently the top post on the article) is trying to paint a picture of some harried manager of a struggling grocery store having to fire up networking tools, which is ridiculous. A company doing tens of billions in revenue employs or contracts some of the "laptop class" (to use that post's terminology) to do that, regardless of what their profit margin is. They don't get a "shift-work labor class" employee to take a break from stacking shelves and check the firewall config.
This is a very weird thread.
I agree; you post some revenue numbers to try and prove a point that theses businesses have a lot of money. When someone reminds that revenue is not the same as profit, you state the numbers aren't relevant.
Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways. Especially when they are thin margins, fat ones usually try and protect the cash cow.
> Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways.
Yeah, and sometimes that results in someone turning their freezers into ovens. I don't think we disagree on this bit.
Grocery store owner A's revenue last year was €500,000. Its profit was €0. It does not have an IT department because it's a corner shop that employs 2 people and has one computer.
Grocery store owner B's revenue last year was €50,000,000,000. Its profit was €0. It has an IT department because it's a huge fucking corporation with a thousand massive stores, multiple office blocks, 150,000 employees and all of the networking and IT infrastructure an operation of that size needs. It's considering opening a bank.
The number that tells you the difference between the scales of these two companies is the revenue, not the profit.
I need to stop wasting my time on the pit of ignorance this site has become.
We also have a struggling supermarket chain (Auchan) and I assure you you can tell just by entering the supermarket that there isn’t a money issue.
Thin margin ? Sure, probably. But if there is enough money to build and develop brand new factorio-like contraptions, I’m sure they can handle fridge controllers well.
And yup, I worked for one of those three actors in their tech department and they are as much as tech-savvy than the other startup. And they have the same tech culture as your favorite startup : no real money issue and not a lot of care given as long as it is shipped.
The IT director was usually a consultant with no say at the executive committee, let alone the board. Reporting to the "Secretary General", along with HR.
It took them a LOT of time to realize that digital was strategic.
Conceptually, you have a physical plant and a PLC and maybe an HMI. Quite sensibly, no one wants to modify this once it works. But you also have a remote access system, and all the remote part should be through a proxy that is continuously updated and only grants access to authorized users. And preferably logs everything and also can act as a sort of web application firewall.
Tailscale is fairly close, and they should consider selling a secured (attested boot, tamper resistant) device with two Ethernet ports (PoE on the uplink side) and WiFi client device capability. Stick a serial number on it, let it be added to a tailnet, and make it impossible for anyone to add anyone else’s device to their own tailnet.
BOM cost would be maybe $20 - we’re talking higher end ESP32-class hardware plus the Ethernet hardware. 100Mbps would be adequate.
Hmm, startup idea: anyone could sell this. The device has a little bootloader and two modes. In provisioning mode, it attests to the mothership (mothership is the vendor, but enterprise plans give an air gapped mode where the vendor can provide a signed config blob and the device can fetch it over TFTP, PXE-style) for configuration. In provisioned mode, it does what it’s configured to do, and it can attest to its firmware + config for purposes of authenticated to, say, Tailscale.
Lots of completely out of touch comments
Tailscale pro pricing is $18 per user per month. Assuming you had one tech per store even, and 500 stores, that is a $9000 per month expense. Ok, not as bad as refrigerant and electric bill costs, but not great. So let's say instead of having a dedicated IT tech per store, we have 5 techs who work from HQ managing the infra for 500 stores.
$90. $90 per-month is all it would've taken to take these fridges off the public internet. If your margins are so razor thin that a monthly $90 bill would threaten profits, I question whether your business is even viable.
First you need to hire somebody who wants to do it. That costs more than $90 a month. Then they need to install whatever equipment is required to bridge the fridge controller to tailscale. Then finally you have a $90 a month cost.
I agree that corporate probably has the budget to do it properly. But the idea that the costs are just the monthly cost is Tailscale is laughable.
No power? Internet hackers? No problem! Freezr is here to save the day!
Those systems are not cheap. It's not the case of lacking few hundred bucks to put it between a VPN box.
It is simply just "well, we weren't hacked before, why change?". Back when those were installed that was just not in the field of view and most those people worried about is changing default password.
And there is another case for industrial equipment, even if it is out of support, what you gonna do, trash a machine because of it ? No, it will be running till it falls apart or it will be more cost effective to replace.
> But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
You either pay small cost now, or bigger cost when someone finds out. So, yes, really. We live in times where you no longer have to pay $500+ for enterprise grade VPN box, you can do very acceptable security wise solutions on cheap hardware or on literally "any old piece of junk"
That's part of the problem. By the time the fully analog original equipment needed replacement, the only commercial replacements available already had been built for network access for quite a number of years while none of the purchasing people were keeping up-to-date with it.
Even the less-massive models are so expensive that the vendors can't fail to include the latest technology whether anybody is using it yet or not, because future. These things don't fly off the shelf very often either and lots of analog leaders "just" used temporary consultants to bolt on some networking without ever gaining any unwanted digital headaches and accompanying expertise.
Along with the routers of the 1990's, inexperienced users were supposed to be able to just connect it and have it work.
Lots of them never connected it to the web or any other network, or maybe years later when there should have been orders of magnitude more security considerations they finally plugged in a long enough ethernet cable and it just worked as they always expected it to once the future got here.
It hasn't been that many decades, conventional (lack of) wisdom is it certainly shouldn't take more effort to install than an analog unit would have required.
That was expensive enough.
People advocating to do nothing? Saying it's not practical to do anything.
Smells botty to me.
About the 2013 Target data breach, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-...
Empire (Sobeys et al) has seen consistent profit margin of ~2% for the last 2 decades.
Loblaws and Metro have higher profit margins at ~3-4% attributable largely to their acquisition of pharmacy brands which function as high margin grocer/convenience storefronts.
For (just?) this fiscal. By saving on IT costs in previous fiscal years they were perhaps able to book profits.
One incident every (say) decade or so may be determined to be worth the trade of between the costs of 'proper' IT practices and getting pwned (and the resulting spoilage) so they can book profits for the other nine years.
Mercosur ain't gonna save the population from starvation if shipping cost start to reflect actual environmental, energetic and geopolitical impact, as the trend seems to go.
Maybe it's even honestly not related to the attack.
Boeing still took the blame for MAX, when their customers didn't pay for training.
Security isn't optional just because margins are low. If eg FedEx decided to disregard security because they only made 3% of the value of the packages they ship in profit, they'd lose most of that business fast. But yes, let's not shame folks for failing to preempt theoretical-yet-unseen threats, if that's what you mean.
At least that's what I got from it.
"The chain wanted to have Internet enabled control and dashboards about their fridges" or something?
You don't get to say you want the perks of being Internet enabled and then turn around and say that protecting against the downsides would cut into your margins too much. Sheesh
I would assume that ~100% of refrigerator based problems would require a new part to be installed, not exactly something you can fix over the network
Now imagine you had 50 such stores.
MPLS? Multi-site Domain? VXLAN? Absolute fantasies, can't be done.
But seriously, networked fridge systems are one of the most straight-forwardly practical use cases for networking tech to improve logistical latency in a supply chain. There are definitely lots of different solutions for securing it depending on scale though.
Sure I would. And my very next thought would be "how do we secure that"
Obviously not the approach that was taken here
The profit motive absolutely favors neglect, and may even punish attempts at reasonable maintenance
Sir, I think you just invented entirely new type of technomarxism. Sunrise, parabellum!
...
As fun as it is, this has nothing to do with laptops and everything to do with someone not implementing Purdue model right.
This is a clear example.
In high-margin industries, you can give a 3% salary increase and free coffee and snacks, it is a rounding error compared to the 20% yoy increase applied to your multi-billion dollar compensation.
My class-brained friend, margin is what you get after wages, not before.
https://www.axios.com/2026/10/13/earnings-3q-ai-stocks
https://www.axios.com/2026/10/13/earnings-3q-ai-stocks
It would be useful to know the scale, as it sounds very similar to an attack on US Military Commisary's a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
Usually i'd feel like this was a large-scale operation but there's no denying that AI tools can copy/parrot/clone this type of work near instantaneously, so who knows.
...or just have them beep if there is an issue.
https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
It's another manifestation of the type of "corporate will rather save 300 dollars from not replacing your faulty motherboard than losing a 25,000 dollar business contract".
If poor decisions are being made it's not just evidence of poor decisions, it's evidence the frameworks used to guide those decisions are fundamentally unintelligent.
More AI -> more slop code -> more attack surfaces that AI can exploit
I feel like this is kind of holding the supermarket hostage and saying, “Sure your freezer is working fine, but if you refuse to buy new freezers from us prepare to get hacked.”
Sure you can argue that the supermarket should have just taken the old freezers offline. But you can also argue that the manufacturer could have supplied software updates but didn’t in order to force sales of newer models.
I've helped do it for industrial equipment (win95 controller or something) that couldn't be upgraded without spending millions, but it sill required pulling out the old 10base2 network and installing cat 6 cables in a factory floor and new switches.
You don't empty a fridge with built-in defrost. Your home fridge defrosts itself every 12-24 hours and you don't have to do anything.
Normally, the temperature recovers in ~1 hour after a defrost. The attack is apparently chaining manual defrost commands one after another so that the interior gets way too hot.
Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079
http.html:"StoreView" https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http.html%3A%22StoreView%...
Total Results: 4,525
Then I remembered that both my AC and floor heating are connected.
A hacker could easily turn on both AC and floor heating and cause me a few euros of damages in my electricity bill.
2014:
> A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets.
> The fridge was one of more than 100,000 devices used to take part in the spam campaign.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25780908
Lessons were not learned:
2017:
> A critical security flaw dubbed HomeHack exposed 1 million LG smartThinQ IoT home devices, enabling hackers to easily gain access to users’ homes and take full control over any LG smart device connected to the account, including dishwashers, vacuums, air conditioners and washing machines, found security researchers from Check Point.
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/securi...
At first I thought exactly that - just why.
When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.
When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.
So all in all - really not needed.
Now, is it connected to the internet? Ha ha ha, no.
For me, the old timey Raspberry Pi B+ fits the bill.
Or detect a door that would not close anymore.
But why, oh why, did they allow someone to change the settings remotely? Wouldn't it work to just tell the local operator to adjust a physical knob when necessary?
Just like in that marvelous Argentinian cartoon "Mercano The Martian", the Idiocracy's little stepbrother.
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.
For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.
What if all manufacturers had to classify their product into internet connected i.e. smart or not. We mandate that manufacturer has to support updates for minimum 5 years or firmware source goes public. Have them put firmware source in escrow as well as have a way to update it.
If a manufacturer wants to reduce their liability then they have to release something to make it semi publicly supportable. With AI agents these days patching the firmware might one day be trivial.
Put some penalities with teeth behind this and maybe manufacturers will think twice before making everything smart.
Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now.
The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.
I remember working on my car when I lived in an apartment. I'd take my tools out into the parking lot, and get to work. If I needed to use the potty, or get a snack, or whatever, I had to pack up the tools and take them inside. Then out again. It really stinks.
I currently live in a high trust neighborhood where I don't need to be present with anything outside.
It's so much better.
Companies and governments need to start taking security extremely seriously. Exposing insecure junk to the internet is a massive risk.
Cyber-vandals doing random attacks for the lulz incentivize, however weakly, stakeholders to securize their system.
Without them, all our infrastructure would crumble at the same time once an APT decides to go all in. At least here we get a preview of how bad things could get.
How would you feel if someone looted your house and justified it with "you should have used better locks?"
Um, if everyone needlesly suffered, we'd not have the problem.
Whereas we have in fact generously provided life-enrichment opportunities - to miscreants.
* Food Lion, 1100 stores
* Stop & Shop, 400 stores
* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores
* Hannaford, ~160 stores
Websites are down at the very least. May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery. Mobile apps are down. “In-app coupon” redemption is likely down.
US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.
These aren't consumer fridges with wifi. The situation on the ground is significantly more complex. There are a lot of embedded sensors and control systems in supply chains in order to minimize waste.
2. Because they think (rightly or wrongly) that the benefits of monitoring and ease of maintenance and their contractor having direct access to the data outweigh the risks.
3. They think it outweighs the risk because IOT has been socially normalized, creating the wide perception that no, it's not that bad.
They almost certainly have insurance for this kind of event, and their insurer will almost certainly think real hard about the pros/cons of this, and will adjust rates accordingly. The grocer is free to take those rates into account when deciding on whether their next store will have an IOT HVAC.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/eam-jaishankar-warns-...
I wonder if this attack is some kind of early warning about capabilities of disruptive forces.
Very few things should be networked, or at the very least, not with any sort of control. I can't even blame the average person anymore for not being as aware about technology, unless there's some sort of aggression or dismissive responses when they're informed of the risks or potential risks. Software developers at this point may very well end up being as despised as lawyers or bankers, for not broadly enough condemning this sort of technological creep, but for being that guy smugly saying something about firmware updates ... on a refrigerator.
TLDR multiple of the installers just wanted to have a public static IP address, and just drop the control systems directly on the internet. None of them knew who was responsible for device updates or CVE's. One of them had an optional proprietary yubikey type thing with no idea how it actually worked. One companies security assurances was basically they always do this and have never had a problem before.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for beyond-corp, but none of the companies we talked to seemed knowledgeable enough to risk it.
Just some insight into how the rest of the world operates, I would expect bigger companies to have more resources, but this is an example of what happens when you're small and dealing with "experts".
Why are these fridges on a network? Feels like an easy fix to me but maybe I'm missing something? Unplug?
> The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered “in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS,” referring to battery management systems.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-warns-hidden-rad...
The largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands has currently halted most of its distribution centers due to an ongoing "cybersecurity incident": https://nltimes.nl/2026/10/12/empty-shelves-likely-albert-he...
https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...
Not authenticated, no access to any endpoint.
Game over.
In this case "hackers" were the type to fuck up a supply chain utilized by the every person for the sake of it. If you have the skills for this, please file a report. Make the world better. But don't just go wrecking a bunch of goods for the lulz like this. It helps no one one, it sours the "hacker" ethos, and it hurts real people.
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
These are commercial units. There is no plug. There is a circuit breaker in the back room, but general rules is only an electrician is allowed to touch them: if they are off there is always a good reason (until now) and so random staffers touching the panel to turn a breaker on is likely to kill somebody.
You'll find that these are quite complex control systems and their data may not be integrated into an operational or security control centre. So if they are not configured for, or resourced (in terms of operators), to handle anomalies, how do they notice and respond?
Without knowing anything about the attack it may be that the controllers were not connected directly to the public Internet, but an on-site VPN that became compromised some other way. Or with a compromised laptop of a technician that connected.
So while you are thinking about fridges today, think about how you would secure and operate control systems across tens of thousands of stores. Would that be easier without Internet connectivity? How do you get qualified and experienced technicians into each (air gapped) store? Another complexity is that many of these systems are part of facilities management systems (HVAC, lighting, security, fire control) and managed or owned by a completely different organisation that is not going to share their data.
She will not be as excited however when the water bill comes and cannot pin point where the additional water they claim to have not used has gone.
Then we move on to even more serious potential life changing appliances that are wifi connected of which your SIL would certainly just be as excited about. Wifi connected hot water tanks of which some here know how they work and what this remote ability allows. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the medical bills come nor every single passing day when she sees the visible scars she must carry for the remainder of her living days for being 'cool' - ironic huh?
Reality hits hard as most humans are reactive and those that have been in this game for many decades grossly understand the dark side of insecurely connecting devices that have life changing implications. Medical devices companies have already shadowed their software mistakes yet such information only stays in the shadows for so long.
"What you cannot see matters most!" and many tech illiterates are currently learning this in most unfortunate ways. Some of that learning will scar both mentally and physically for life. Ain't it cool!
Many people here reading this are a lot smarter than I and such can therefore extrapolate and add to what is unfolding in the world. It shows little sign of stopping as more and more devices are connected daily under the guise of 'easy'.
Thus the underlying absolute reason to "Stay Healthy!"
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is hard.
Authentication is easy, getting people (esp. leadership) to give a shit is hard.
Control loop is obviously local and performed by dedicated controller hardware. If you only need remote monitoring then don't expose any management functionality.
If you want remote management, then define an envelope of allowable system parameters that can be controlled remotely. Allowing defrost to be initiated remotely has obvious risks and known solutions - add a hardware interlock, like a physical button or a key switch.
Even if you ignore all other precautions and allow all parameters to be controlled without limitations, strong authentication is still easy to implement, if anyone cares enough to do it.
why not put them behind corporate VPN of some kind?
...and meanwhile, here we have (mostly smaller) supermarkets with decades old "dumb" equipment which would be completely unaffected by such things.
Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.
For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human.
I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application.
"But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...
1791807336 | Major French Supermarket Chains Hit by Cyber-Attack, Food Stock Impacted | https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/french-supermarke... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055291 | 1 comment
1791807743 | French supermarket chains say cyberattack forced refrigerator shutdown | https://www.afp.com/en/french-supermarket-chains-say-cyberat... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055361 | 1 comment
1791817148 | Hackers heat French supermarket fridges, sparking fires and food losses | https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/french-supe... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50057384 | 1 comment
1791817733 | Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack | https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crq5nzxv9q4yo | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50057551 | 3 comments
1791819381 | French supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack | https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50057956 | 0 comments
1791819381 | French supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack | https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50057956 | 2 comments
1791821728 | French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack | https://www.afp.com/en/french-supermarkets-suffer-refrigerat... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058569 | 7 comments
1791826738 | French supermarkets face food crisis after cyberattack hits refrigerators | https://www.politico.eu/article/french-supermarkets-face-foo... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50059910 | 1 comment
1791828550 | French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack | https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/1865776/french-supermarkets... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060387 | 17 comments
1791837123 | Cyberattack Disrupts Refrigeration Systems at French Supermarkets | https://www.france24.com/en/france/20261012-french-supermark... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50062620 | 1 comment
Maybe they shouldn't.
You actually do want to be able to monitor them remotely, like most industrial/commercial refrigeration, to detect failures faster and more reliably. They should still be at least secured with normal auth/autz in addition to perimeter security, though.
If I can know when a fridge failed within the hour (even at night) then I can also dispatch a technician same/next day more easily.
Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.
- The device’s control has a radio transmitter that emits its readings, but no receiver. Listen for those messages to monitor it but there’s not a physical path to reply to it.
- The device’s controller writes a database or message queue. Its code never reads from that source. Monitors listen to those messages.
And many, many similar methods with the same core concept: the item transmits its status but doesn’t have a method to receive replies. You just have to commit to using any one of those thousands of mechanisms.
If it were hacked to start delivering temperature readings that were dangerously-high while you were out of town, then: Would you keep the food, or discard it?
Read-only is a strong control with lots of solid implementations.
But to address your specific point:
being able to monitor does not ( or at least should not ) automatically equal put it on the web
Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.
This line suggests the units themselves were targeted individually with a hack:
> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.
But the problem with networked devices spread across tens of thousands of pretty much unguarded locations, surrounded by unvetted employees, but taking orders form a central location is that there is no such thing as "not online". They'll talk to the management server used to set up the nightly defrost schedules across the fleet. Even if they are in an isolated VLAN, it's always one step away from someone connecting a Pi to that network and off they go online. There's only so much zero-trust, NAC/802.1x and segmentation can do when some devices will be too old to support these and their network will be the entry point to the management server, then to the whole fleet.
I'm honestly very surprised that a couple of things things haven't happened yet: the central server for managing these fleets getting hacked and allowing access to the entire fleet, and/or the companies realizing that the only way to limit the reach of an attack is to physically not have the hardware needed to do remote control.
In my world the central server can be hack in two ways, that is by a malicious operator or via some scheme like the US/Israeli attack on Irans uranium centrifuges. The central server also have no business being online, that to is on a closed network, running the whitelisted applications from the manufacturer.
As long a schedule is conceived in one place and applied in another, even with human intervention on both sides, either one of the sides can be swindled. At this point with the bar for a successful hack being lower than ever, completely removing the hardware necessary to make remote changes is probably the only way to limit the blast radius.
Maybe allowing to send the schedule but requiring a local employee to operate a local hardware only control to apply it could work, but who has the money for this kind of complexity. Something like this on every freezer (device, really) in a fleet probably costs multiples of the money they lost with the spoiled food.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522
I have a smart fridge and washer. I won't name names. But for several years they were never connected or online at all (unless they was compromised and I didn't know). I connected them and one of the first updates included in the washer was changing the default wash cycle from something like 110 minutes to 46 or something. I don't remember all the values if I'm honest.
There are executives who have spreadsheets and charts of how much water that saved per household over varying periods of time. How much it would save with greater adoption. And the unsaid message, or maybe they'll be explicit, of how many people are going to face tragic water supply issues in the future.
It's a powerful message, even if we know it's cyncical and calculated to push not just washers, but firmware security systems and institutions to govern those systems.
And yes, compromised systems can also be used to build zombie networks to push horrible content.
I feel horrible that this critically important surface issue of water supply is used to push other agendas. I honestly wish I could do other work not related to it.
Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.
More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:
I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.
In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.
Which is how they got into this situation. These are industrial refrigeration systems subject to a huge list of variables (how many units, their sizes, and doors hooked up to a refrigeration circuit, open vs closed cases, ambient conditions, hours of store operation, what type of refrigerant, whether heat is going to a cooling tower or air heat exchanger). They use a ton of energy, and percent optimization leads to millions of dollars over a fleet. They are designed to let the user dial in every operating parameter, like defrost.
Compare this to my home fridge where all these parameters are fixed in the firmware because the hardware is 100% identical.
Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
Honestly, reality begs to differ.
This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.
Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to connect any home appliances to the Internet. I have a limited number of Zigbee devices, and they are managed through Home Assistant and can't access the Internet.
Then again when was the last time you opened your freezer hundreds of times during one day, letting humid air in and building ice at an accelerated rate? These units actively heat up the back of the freezer (evaporator plate) nightly to quickly melt the ice without warming up the food.
There is no reason to directly trigger it remotely but they probably work on a customizable schedule, to account for different store opening times, timezones, or freezer size and model. The hackers could target that schedule to make the defrost last longer.
Within a store certain freezers get more traffic than others, depending on how they're stocked, where they're located, etc, and therefore likely require more frequent defrosting. But that's something the store managers can figure out. It doesn't need to be managed remotely by some third party. So why did someone engineer that capability?
More features, generally, means more failure modes. More ways to exploit the system. Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion. It's very unhealthy and disordered behavior from an engineering standpoint--sacrificing reliability and simplicity for... what exactly? Some centralized control capability? But why?
That's like saying the store manager should manage the store website and networks instead of the chain's IT department.
No grocery store manager is going to be a licensed refrigeration technician. Ask them if they know about basic refrigeration concepts like superheat and subcooling, high side and low side pressures, compressor oils...
Further, a grocery store wants to optimize efficiency down to the percent, because that will save tens of millions of dollars over the fleet, and CO2 emissions. A store manager hardly has the capability.
> Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
The purpose of the automation is the same as always, to run at peak effectiveness and reduce human error. Most of the workers in this industry much like the fast food one, are low paid, low skill, receiving only basic training, with a high turnover rate, across tens of thousands of locations from major cities to somewhere in the sticks. Even a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage that's only obvious too late. So this extra work is taken out of their hands. You should really see a lot of the machines the big fast food chains use, you'd be amazed.
This kind of decision was never left to the store manager. In the past they'd get a printout and probably fail to follow the instructions occasionally, which may or may not cause damage or increases operating costs across the entire fleet. Now it's done over the network like everything else, for better or worse.
> Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion.
> More features, generally, means more failure modes.
Here's the kicker, they are necessary and desired by the customer and the failure scenarios were almost definitely factored into their calculations. I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
And normally I'd agree (more) with you but the small scale of the hack makes me think they've done a decent job at securing them so far. Spending more on people and security to avoid any hack (right?), or losing efficiency over tens of thousands of locations costs more than the spoiled food.
There isn't a complex real time control scenario here.. Obviously defrosting too much wastes energy, so you'll want to get that one right. But does having centralized control over that really make a difference at scale? Does having centralized control over temperature set-point make any difference?
From the basic physics of the process it's hard to imagine real time remote control being a decisive factor in efficiency.
> I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
I mean.. maybe? But nothing you wrote actually demonstrates that.
[edit] I guess if it's not about efficiency but instead a trust issue then it makes more sense from a marketing standpoint. But generally remote control isn't a great way to work around untrusted operators with physical access. They could just prop a door open or slice the seal if they wanted to..
Adjust: possibly, withing a range
Shutting down: Big no no
If an action needs another (physical) action to proceed, then don't make one independent of the other (obviously)
I see such idiots daily, in all venues of life: the world is simply really full of dumbfucks.
It's simply how things are and we shouldn't be afraid of pointing it out.
I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?
On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).
Second time this sh*t happens in a week, this website is the pits i swear
Yes, yes they did. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/...
"ALL freezers went into defrost mode – ALL frozen food has spoiled".
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just can’t help themselves apparently.
Why, so you can turn it on from your smartphone when you're out of town, of course!
"Well, I can't help you there, but I can turn off the fume hood from my phone!"
"..."
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
Can you turn that off or do you just have to put up with the noise?
Of course we can control it, it's all wired up via Home Assistant.
We specifically want to prevent scenarios like: you take a leak, the leak turns into a shitting session or a phone call, you forgot you left the burner on.
2. Most of the time my wife and I make food together so if one person needs to take a leak the other one is around anyway.
3. For long slow cooking, we have plenty of comfy seating in the kitchen/dining area where we can get work done while being in sight of pots.
4. We have 2 pets we'd need to locate in an emergency, and so we tend to put electrical and fire safety higher than most people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFuizX3SiyE
if(temp > 5) return;
To boot, refrigeration has been wholly automatic for decades. It literally runs itself. It doesn't need any network connectivity other than to say "I work" and "I'm broken" and that's it. Allowing control commands to be sent over the network is, yet again, just asking for trouble.
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4192998/
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
You think about a frontal attack like in Ukraine, and maybe you're right. But Russia is already waging a much more subtle war against NATO. Look at who's leading the US. Look at Brexit. Or look at who could soon lead France or Germany... Their conventional army may be weak, but they don't need to fire a bullet either.
And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Their political influence, even with right-wing politicians who might be skewed their way, will be limited. And could change at any moment as we've seen with Orban.
Russia continued WW1 with a civil war that lasted until 1922. Their military deaths were quite evenly split between the world war stage and the civil war stage.
A) Lots of Russians died during WW2, it wasn’t “evil Russia sends troops from occupied republics to fight for them while Russians sit back”.
B) Lots of mercenaries from post-Soviet republics fight for money on Russias side now
C) Russia didn’t pull out because they’ve run out of men. Where did you get this?
There are a couple of good WWI documentaries on YouTube which you can watch for free. You'll find that C) is the truth.
I wonder where then the millions of soldiers that fought the russian civil war came from.
And the might of the US/UK/etc are a hundred times stronger than the Taliban in Afghanistan, however who ended up winning that war? Or how about Vietnam?
My point being: the size/capability of a military doesn't necessarily result in a win. I think NATO forces have a particular problem of being pretty unmotivated about Ukraine winning.
Conventional military powers sure seem like they were overrated.
Now Russia is one of only two players with years of experience in the latest generation of warfare, while NATO is still stuck in the 20th century.
I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.
GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.
You're assuming rational behavior, but time and time again world leaders have demonstrated that they will pursue erratic behavior if their feelings or vibe suggest them that behavior to be their way out of their own trouble.
Russia doesn’t need direct attack on NATO to intimidate, or even destroy the alliance. And even if it did attack NATO member, it is going to be guess what? A discussion. Just like what they have right now. It’s not going to be DEFCON style theatrical attack from the united West on Russia. You know what happens during WW2? When Russia and Germany carved up Poland? Nothing happened when France declared war on Germany. There was a period of 8 months where they just stared at each other. It was called “Phoney war”. Chances are we might witness Russia just steam rolling Baltics while the West talks between each other what to do next.
So the current incident was a preemptive alert by Brussels.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw0k0g57mk3zo
So a lot of their territorial loss can be attributed to his inaction. If they'd laid several million landmines in the Donbass the Russian attack would've been stumped and the occupied Crimea would've been easy prey.
If you mobilize your armed forces and move all your soldiers to the border and dig them in you'll dissuade an attacker from invading.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donetsk_fortress_belt
It used to be much more true. The Biden admin sent a lot more US weapons to fight Russia, Trump used to be much more amenable to send similar weapons provided somebody paid for it.
Nowadays US materiel is either tied up in the middle east or somewhere else (Patriots), or has been neutralized by Russian EW (HIMARS), or the US is just unwilling to part with it for whatever justification.
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
A single Tomahawk missile could obliterate Moscow which would immediately end the war because Russia is extremely centralized. It's the reason almost 80% of all Russian SAM capability is stationed around the city.
Putin is unpredictable but he's not stupid. You don't become president of Russia by being stupid.
Do you even know how big Moscow is? And nuclear Tomahawks were discontinued. Even if they weren’t, you’d need dozens to obliterate Moscow.
Who attacked Ukraine, again?
I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
This is of course a stupid lie they are telling themselves. They've been invading Ukraine since 2014. They had the option of being good international citizens, with an elite flying to the west and buying some football teams for their entertainment, but they chose not to do that.
> Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that.
Russia can retreat inside their internationally recognized borders at any time. The problem is they don't want to sue for peace because that would admit losing, and include losing illegally annexed territory. They've made no serious attempts at even starting negotiations with Europe, while escalating "hybrid warfare".
I'm living in europe and listen to many political news, both domesstic and abroad. And I never heard anyone saying that they actually want to invade "europe", at least not as a hole.
There are analyzers --- but not at EU "establishment" level, whatever that might be --- that claim that Russia, after 4+ year long regeneration phase after the Ukraine war might invade parts of Estonia. Already they started with some hybrid stuff there, with some new "people's republic Narva" drawn out of a magic hat.
Also, there is no need to "reboot" EU manufacturing. For example, Germany had the highest export numbers it ever had in June, 139 billion euro in just one month.
Other than that: Russia is estimated to have lost 1.5 million people already in this "3 day special military operation". No one in his right mind assumes that they can start another thing like now.
They however have gained LOTS of skills on what works and works not, military. E.g. the trickle-in strategies, glide bombs, drone warfare works. A navy without support, tanks and even airspace superiority attempts don't work.
What e.g. german military generals say is: Russia is already in a hybrid conflict (they didn't use "war" as word) with Germany. One can see this by attempts to destabilize the society, by very high level of espionage (said to be higher than during cold war times), to drone reconnaissance jobs over military AND civil infrastructures (logistics, power, railway etc). And by the odd attack on things here, like people or weapon manufacturers.
If nothing else, war has been many times convenient to keep regimes in power (see Bush post 9/11 for an obvious example). Putin might want to strengthen his case. See absurd discussions / push for a "Republic of Narva" as an example cause belli.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/opinion/ukraine-russia-in...
A sect of realpolitik theorists outlined why Russia would be compelled to invade Ukraine. Even Kissinger thought that expansion of NATO westward would compel war with Russia. To say no one predicted this or that it’s self-defeating for Russia is a mistake of analysis. The war logically follows from Russia’s security goals.
According to Kozyrev, instead of a patchwork of dysfunctional countries at war with each other like in the former Yugoslavia (with overspilling effects on Russia), EU and NATO integration helped build modern, peaceful and predictable countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which in practical terms meant "free-of-charge security" (his term) for Russia. What's there to complain about?
Furthermore, Mearsheimer et al treat countries as monoliths and completely ignore the competing interests of groups and individuals within them. Russia of the early 1990s was a flawed democracy; today it is a totalitarian dictatorship. The war against Ukraine is a downstream effect of the destruction of Russian democracy and consolidation of absolute power into the hands of Putin's security apparatus gang. Putin wants to be remembered as a "great ruler" and that's all there is to it; a small man who managed to gain absolute power, no different from Hitler.
Because Russian leadership is acting in self interest and preservation and a neverending state of war might be what secures its own position and power.
They can't take Kiev but they're threatening Paris.
By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.
What could possibly go wrong?
The grid could stabilize as a side effect. And the cars are already connected to the internet.
No firmware updates. no admin configuration. no ssh backdoors. just a transmit-only system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
It sounds like you think victims are necessarily blameless.
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
"Hey, maybe we shouldn't send men over the top only to die in a barrage of machine gun fire..."
"That's just victim blaming--it isn't our behavior that needs to change; it is the enemy's behavior that needs to change."
Victim-blaming is another term that is apparently becoming a meaningless vibe.
In my experience, new cars have new car problems, but old cars have old car problems.
There’s no clear winner in every metric, just trade offs.
> in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
If you are not a genius and someone calls you a genius, well, for you the future is already here, genius! (Shit I didn't really mean that :P)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duns_Scotus
Lots of industrial controls haven’t been updated since they were deployed in the 90’s. “And why should they be? If it ain’t broken…” Well, because they’re freaking broken!
So I’m glad that this happened in a tangible, public way people can easily understand without it involving something much more drastic. If your family asks about this, explain that you’re glad no one blew up a gas pipeline… yet.
Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most. There have been numerous examples of lax security in this area already and a fleet of rogue cars or delivery trucks could obviously cause huge amounts of damage, injury, and loss of life.
There's a legacy of openness in car tech and software that was never designed with robust security and isolation of critical components in mind. I've heard that this has started to change more recently and that's reassuring if true. But this still feels like an area with far too little regulation or oversight given the past choices of vehicle manufacturers and far too much rush to connect everything up remotely even for minor convenience reasons.
In some cases there also now seems to be legally mandated connectivity for things like automated emergency calls after an accident. This should at least have a genuine benefit in the unfortunate situation that it's needed - but until vehicle security looks more like Fort Knox than a sandcastle it might still prove to be a bad choice in the end.
Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. Find the cellular modem fuse and pull it. You now have a modern, but fully offline car. Security aside, connected cars are absolutely awful for your privacy.
The "straightforward" solution is to tell vehicle manufacturers that they aren't allowed to sell vehicles with connectivity unless they also have proper security and privacy protections in place. If no-one can give them money for it then they won't do it.
I am not aware of such a requirement in the U.S. In any case, it would be extremely difficult to enforce, and many cars that initially had connectivity went offline when 3G networks were decommissioned. I doubt those cars are now "illegal."
> Our research uncovered a hidden "code-of-the-day" authentication mechanism that could be abused to bypass normal authentication
> Our analysis began by examining the internet exposure of these devices, where we identified thousands of publicly accessible management interfaces
> (shell injection vulnerability in management interface)
This is how we used to vibe-code before we had LLMs.
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).
Wonderful world we live in where refrigerators and cars also become e-waste because a manufacturer gets tired of patching them
We're in a "post-patching world" in that the number of 0days coming out is so rapid, I'm not sure it would even matter.
The physical architecture itself is the problem. There needs to be better controls (physical and software) to access those systems. Airgap possibily.
It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control; a supermarket is a place where there are always people, it's not a base on Mars. And even if a remote is needed, it should probably not go further than the manager's office.
I don’t know to what degree control is needed, but remote supervision of cold holding temperatures is good to make sure food doesn’t spoil. Most places that don’t have networked fridges have staff manually logging the cold holding temperatures to make sure things are working.
Again, though, I don’t know about making changes though.
The other, more likely, answer is that there’s a diagnostic mode that allows raw control of the system and no one bothered to require physical presence to enable service mode.
With remote firmware update capability, at attacker could easily brick the entire fleet. With just service access it could be possible but would be more complex.
Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.
Wow, are you an optimist. The manufacturer has stated that they're past the period of security updates. And others... meaning the supermarkets? They outsource that. The people they outsource it to? Maybe they'll start paying attention to security.
Probably to inflict pain on the life of the voters so they can blame the government and manipulate the 2027 French presidential election in April. Maybe just a test.
Same as the high velocity train being sabotaged again just in the Spain national day. Hybrid war.
In France this benefits the pro-Russian Lepen's party with the "government is a disaster but we will make them pay for your suffering". Page "16" of the manual. In the end is all the same handbook all around the planet.
Just by the record, EU has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia so yes, they know. The more desperate grows Russia, the more this will happen. Until it will stop, suddenly, for no reason.
But it could be just for the lulz.
Remember the hackers behind the seven proxies, AntiSec, which hacked the NATO library website, and went to prison for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec
I wonder how many more decades of screaming into the void will be required for it to be taken seriously by those who deny any/all security efforts until after the disaster has already happened (and then still will only approve the absolute minimum required efforts)...
For the same reason, we hardly have heating meters in Germany that aren't wireless connected to the maintenance company.
To save costs doing maintenance trips to check their state.
Modern HVAC and fire control b systems for buildings are often connected now as well
It also wouldn't be a big deal when a supermarket employee makes an old-fashioned phone call (gasp!) to the refrigerator service company when some red light starts blinking ;)
For last few years everyone talks about moving away from selling products towards selling cooling services, and connecting everything to the internet.
Of course, there are good premises - predictive maintenance, automation etc. But this won't make disasters that await us any smaller.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
They sell fricken refrigerators for God's sake. Maybe I can understand planned obsolescence for a cell phone, but a fridge? And especially to grocery stores that operate on razor thin margins to begin with, the idea that they'll just dump their old working refrigerators because the manufacturer refused security updates is a guaranteed recipe for stuff like this.
AK-SM800 looks like a current product. Danfoss have a PDF dated 2026.06 about it: https://assets.danfoss.com/documents/latest/590332/BC3376298.... This mentions "All new Electronics platform supporting new Operating System (based on Linux)", and specifically advises against connecting it to the internet.. Reading between the lines, especially section 10.5, it sounds like there was a major security revamp in 'release 4.0'. The article mentions "outdated firmware", so perhaps that refers to things before 4.0.
AK-SC355 looks like a product from 2010 (that's the date in the PDF metadata, plus the examples in the manual mention 2009). https://3.imimg.com/data3/ID/LC/MY-3170595/danfoss-system-ma...
I haven't worked with supermarket control systems, so I only know what I've read in the PDFs, but it looks like this is not about throwing out entire fridges to update the control system. If you have the newer AK-SM800, it looks like the suggested action is to update firmware and follow instructions about keeping it well away from internet access. If you have the older AK-SC355, then keeping it away from the internet is even more important. Or, update to AK-SC355.
But the hack has already been disclosed and it's the responsability of the manufacturer to ensure that the fridge keep ever up to date or offline.
As with the USA Defense hack, it could have been prevented.
The hack: https://blog.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controll...
I can't for the life of me understand why these systems aren't air gapped, or at the very least network access is restricted to a small number of IPs or hardware keys.
I could see remote monitoring (of temps) and logging on the system (cycle time etc) but does one really need to control the defrost cycle? It's probably just a web interface on a single controller that used to be accessed by HVAC techs only.
> > "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
Because it's the EU I have to wonder if they will finally mandate that software go into escrow and be released if support stops.
Hopefully it will extend to consumer tech like iPhones and other “waste as soon as {corp} is done with it”
They use cold cases and have rooftop or outdoor condensing units and evaporators inside of the cold cases/freezers/etc. There’s refrigerant piping running all over the place and there’s a bunch of sensors and relays that are automated to manage the refrigeration system.
My assumption is the Danfoss control system they’re using is EOL, it’s the grocer’s responsibility to upgrade their automation equipment if it’s unsupported.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates". It said its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 fridge regulator systems were notably affected, with a version of the former using "outdated firmware". It added that it had long advised supermarkets to update from those models.
That being said I am curious what is typically the amount of time for software support offered on a newly released equipment and how common it is for super market to use obsolete software (especially for the part which carry some security risk like something with remote control). Also what about the insurance? Will they (fully) cover the financial loss? I don't know what is in their insurance contract and I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that using obsolete software make the supermarket responsible to some extent
It's a near guarantee. I've been in dozens of power plants where the engineering workstations or operator interface terminals are running Windows XP or Windows 7. More than zero of which were not properly air-gapped. If those sites (with sizable CapEx budgets) delay upgrading for various reasons I would expect grocery store chains to keep whatever they have running until it's broken to the point of not being fixable without a complete overhaul.
https://www.danfoss.com/en/industries/food-and-beverage/dcs/...
Dispatch an HVAC tech if an alarm comes up. Physical access should be the only way to shut down a system like this.
Your opinion does not change the fact that virtually every automation system can be access remotely. It can be done safely with proper access controls.
gestures broadly
No, there is not always someone onsite with the experience and knowledge to monitor and change the system. Grocery stores do not have staff refrigeration techs onsite, they contract that out.
Big supermarkets long predate the invention of the Internet of Shit. Why do you have to talk about that like that's an inevitability that can't be fixed? the current situation was caused by your ilk of parasites. We used to know to how to maintain such things without remote control perfectly fine. There was no ubiquitous internet in the 80s.
The family run supermarket I'm very familiar with that eventually was taken over by Hannaford absolutely had their own HVAC techs. Years ago at least.
You know what Hannaford did to that store after they bought it? They said that it would have to be a "smaller" store in their system, with less product diversity, fewer departments, less attention, less investment.
Do you know what that store was famous for, and why Hannaford placed it as the center of that deal? Because it did really really well, ran very profitably, and was essentially preferred by the (poor) community despite the Walmart 10 miles away. This store was so well run in the opinion of Hannaford Corporate, that they gave the former assistant manager, who had a working relationship with Hannaford for 20 years, priority over other internal applicants for high level management roles in order to get him to fix their problems at other stores. They lost another valuable manager due to that decision!
Their problems at another store were that it takes in $1 million a day but they refuse to pay more than local minimum wage to staff it. They struggled to keep that store staffed well, and this store in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the area looked like shit because stuff was never done.
Hannaford is currently seeing incredibly stiff competition from Market Basket and Costco. People who have trusted Hannaford (in the new england way where it means something) their entire lives are turncoating to Market Basket because why the hell not? It's just a store. They all suck. They can't compete on prices because distributors and upstream corporate behemoths set the prices. They can't compete on quality, because they buy that product from the exact same truck. The company explicitly has chosen to go the direction of competing on vibes of "Upmarket" product lines from the in house brand.
You know what Hannaford didn't do? Raise wages. You know what that Manager eventually did? He re-retired and gave up the good pay, good benefits, reliable and easy income to trade for being a physical laborer and building decks for rich people, because then nobody will be so stupid as to tell him to not do the things that he knows would improve things, and has the 40 year career to back it up. Hannaford had been courting him since the 90s, because that's literally how competent he was. This man went back to destroying his body, after a diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis, After a new Marriage, after economic uncertainty, because he literally wasn't allowed to be a good fucking manager of a business that he has known in his bones for decades. They didn't let him solve all their problems! Because either that would have affected how they want their profits to work, or because that's just how stupidly pig-headed and petty the modern Executive class is.
We fix it when it breaks. We replace it when even the aftermarket doesn't supply the parts to keep it working.
Will they never learn?
The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.
Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.
Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.
The idea is not to solve everything with one simple trick, but to reduce the attack surface as much as possible in hardware. If you are dumb enough to make your 4 messages something like off, on, hard reset, random dangerous maintenance protocol, then it does nothing. If instead it encodes 4 useful and typically used states that can't destroy your system, then you have massively reduced the requirement for onsite, and accepted that more serious issues require onsite control.
It's not an easy balance to strike, though; the less capable the remote interface is, the less useful it is. "Only completely harmless commands" might simply not be good enough. For example, is "deactivate electricity output of this solar panel" (e.g. because market conditions make it unprofitable to supply at a given instance) harmless or not? What about "increase supplied frequency by 0.01 Hz to stabilize the grid"?
If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.
* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.
Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.
I doubt the fridge has a remote-controlled robot arm to unload itself.
Meanwhile you can use analog gauges if you need perfect max temperature monitoring.
That's what always pisses me off about this. Someone brought up "Hey, if we connect this to the internet to enable that feature, someone will start hacking fridges and hurting our customers, and I don't think the stupid page with a temperature graph on it is worth that tradeoff", and some ass told them to get over it and implement it.
Raymond Chen used to write about feature development at Microsoft, specifically how every single new feature idea started from a negative position, since it requires support and testing and engineering and thought, and has future repercussions, so it's often not a good idea to just add box checking features.
Microsoft believed this in the 90s. For things like UI functionality. That's the effort and thought and restraint required to have a consistent UI, for things to be thought out.
Somehow, between then and now, the industry threw all that thought away, and now everything has 400 totally unused, half implemented, utterly broken features.
Why are we here? "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.
That's termed Post-IPO problem. :)
Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.
Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.
These are minimum wage workers - they don't have bean bags in the nap room, employee massages and stock options.
Groceries see HVAC in the same way. If they can get their issue addressed or diagnosed by their HVAC contractor without him having to schedule and physically travel to their site, they'd prefer him to solve/start solving the problem immediately. Time is money and the faster the tech can diagnose the problem, the faster he can get on fixing it.
And yes, the prevalence of these systems means that many HVAC techs have the ability to turn off their customers' air conditioners/fridges. They don't use it maliciously, because that would be actual suicide for their business.
---
Source: A close friend of mine runs an HVAC business (~8 employees) doing residential and commercial installs, repairs, and maintenance.
I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.
Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.
There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.
I shouldn’t need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.
The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.
So we schedule service, and then we throw away all the food anyway because the problem cannot be addressed remotely.
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
The grocer likely has the least expertise. The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
contracted programmers <-> fridge equipment maker <-> HVAC sales/service group <-> grocer
3 of the 4 companies could have all said to themselves "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws ? The grocer(s).
They're selling network-accessible equipment so it's their duty to make it secure within some well-defined envelope. How's that any different from any other part of engineering and product development?
> "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws
Soon that will be the OEMs, per the EU Cyber Resilience Act [1]:
> Directive (EU) 2024/2853 [on liability for defective products] of the European Parliament and of the Council (16) is complementary to this Regulation. That Directive sets out liability rules for defective products so that injured persons can claim compensation when a damage has been caused by defective products. It establishes the principle that the manufacturer of a product is liable for damages caused by a lack of safety in their product irrespective of fault (strict liability). Where such a lack of safety consists in a lack of security updates after the placing on the market of the product, and this causes damage, the liability of the manufacturer could be triggered. Obligations for manufacturers that concern the provision of such security updates should be laid down in this Regulation.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/2847/oj/eng
With floor planning, the loss itself could be spread across multiple companies, under multiple insurance policies.
With that said, this particular hack could easily be a systems / networking "configuration error" and not any particular piece of softwares fault ( as in a bug, or hardcoded backdoor password. )
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
I happen to have a Danfoss HVAC controller here, and its controllable via Modbus. Its an older model, but its my understanding that larger HVAC systems commonly use Modbus.
Modbus systems are multi-drop serial, and the hack likely came in from the server side of one of the companies involved, and the HVAC controllers were all sent defrost commands. Thats my guess anyway.
I have a pump thats Modbus controllable as well, made by a company called Grundfos.
Gonna make a water battery.
Shift my cooling load into off-peak rate hours.
Stickin it to the power man. :D
Seriously, you guys would love these pumps.
https://product-selection.grundfos.com/us/products/magna-nor...
It has wifi. Neighbor kids are gonna defrost me. :(
I'm in the beginning stages of giving my home HVAC system an upgrade and using Modbus throughout with various adapter boards.
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-...
Newer PCI standards require much more secure customer-facing terminals and much more secure back-end systems so that much of this attack could not happen again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Sec...
You have clearly never stepped foot inside an Albert Heijn store.
I have not. I travel in the ALDI circle.
2.1% net profit is what AI says the US grocery industry averages, so individual product margins would be higher.
edit: these are unlikely to be directly connected to the internet, but rather part of an internal network that got popped, likely a while a go too
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
Source: https://www.visitflanders.com/en/discover-flanders/culinary-...
The Belgian fries have no leg to stand on, nothing. Sorry. Just my opinion :) but I’ve been a life long fries lover from Germany - and these beat out all other fries I had so far in Europe at least by a wide margin :P
I know it wasn’t your article but I wanted to spread this important knowledge to the world!!