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Comment by kickling | Hacker News Reader

One of Sweden's biggest grocery stores / supermarkets, Coop [1], is keeping all their 800 physical stores closed today, since their payment system is not working because of an IT-attack somewhere in their supply chain [2]. Connected to this attack?

[1] https://www.coop.se/ [2] https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/coop-butiker-haller-stangt-...

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Most definitely, googling "Coop" "Kaseya" gives a few articles showing they've implemented it for parts of their organizaiton since at least 2009.

Patients in Region Skåne were also unable to access their journals on Friday afternoon (possibly unrelated) and Coop's competitor ICA's apothecary company Apoteket Hjärtat seems to be affected by Kaseya/REvil attack also.

A cashless society is scary. Cash should always be an option and the inventory system should be disconnected from the internet.

In my country (Switzerland), while they have massively invested in cashless solutions, a lot of places are still accepting cash, and I think it is a good thing. One of the big retailer (Coop) has self-checkout machines that accept and give back cash (you can insert 200CHF~216USD at a time if you want).

Jordan (head of SNB) is not going to let cash go and even kept the CHF 1000 bill under EU pressure. Thank God.

What urks me is the obvious "never let a crisis go to waste" where we have visa etc marketing that cash might spread Corona.

Yes, I've put CHF 200 in coop register before. Funny, they don't care but if I scan a tiny bottle of alcohol I need to wait for someone to approve it...

You can pay with cash at Coop. Most if not all cash registers allow cash payments. Most customers don't pay with cash.

Yes but how does the cashier know what the price is?

How does the cashier open the safety box to reach the money?

Or open the cash registry?

I don't even think it is legal to accept money without a working cash registry for tax registration reasons.

But that was my point exactly. Sure, you can live in Sweden without even knowing how cash looks like so it is cashless in a way. But, if the cash register is not functioning then you are done* with or without cash in your pocket.

* I'd wager that if you know the prices and keep track of what you sell, you'd be fine recording the transactions after the fact.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s illegal to accept payment without offering a receipt with all of the correct info, which among a bunch of things include a unique incrementing receipt number.

It is more about being able to produce the receipt to the tax authorities. Even street hawkers have to have a certified machine in sweden now.

https://www4.skatteverket.se/rattsligvagledning/edition/2017...

> Yes but how does the cashier know what the price is?

My understanding was that it was just payment processing that was affected, not the point of sale systems. The scanners and things probably work fine, and I think they could accept cash payments without issue. It’s just not worth it when almost no customer pays with cash.

I'm quite sure that it was the whole POS. The Coop next to where I live accespts Swish (QR/mobile payment) and it was closed as well.

The thing is I was in Coop yesterday when the attack started and they had at least two payment methods working fine. Swish and cash.

They likely closed to avoid issues with rejecting customers who didn't get the message. Or perhaps just to be on the safe side because they didn't know who the attack was aimed at.

Confirmed here: https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/86bQQw/coop-butiker-...

Gee, cashless is such a great idea.

In related news, I saved money by replacing all my house's circuit breakers with old pennies.

I dont think this is necessarily due to 'cashless' as much as general computerization. Stuff like prices, article numbers and inventory are likely all digitized nowadays, so even if people could pay with cash I imagine they'd still be keeping closed.

Why isn't the local shop's systems autonomous - the should sync to the company central, sure, but they shouldn't need constant connection to lookup prices.

I think that this is the case, from the reporting it seems like it’s just their payment infrastructure that is affected. Likely they could handle cash transactions just fine. It’s just that the vast, vast majority of Swedish customers don’t use cash anymore, so it’s not worth it to keep the stores open until it’s fixed.

That sounds so wrong, they should try to use cash if they can.

Going cashless is extremely common for customers in Sweden. They would get so few customers (everyone would just go to the next grocery store), and the aggravation it would cause from customers who haven't heard the news and can't pay probably just makes it not worth it to have them open. Take the loss, fix the issue, reopen all the stores when it's done.

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