Hacker News Reader

Comment by l33tman | Hacker News Reader

The impact is that 20% of Sweden's food supply is locked out. This is larger than what it seems, not just for Swedish meatballs - the underlying Kaseya hack is global.

It's truly scary that you can get into these kinds of situations (completely relying on a 3rd party IT), but it's also very costly to have a doubled setup :/

View on HN

Once, while working at a large grocery store, we lost power. The emergency lights came on, but all the cash registers stopped working. One of the managers ran to the back of the store and returned with hand cranks that fit into the side of the cash registers. It was darker, but sales did not stop. The time required to re-train the cashiers was negligible.

This cyber attack will probably result in a doubling down of the same technology that put them into this position. Perhaps, in addition, they should look for a lower tech fall back approach.

A key point is remembering the reason for computerization & automation is efficiency.

The difference between less (manual) & more (computerized) efficiency is probably less important than the difference between stopping & continuing operations, in exceptional times.

Waffle House and Home Depot (among others) are pretty good at internalizing this, and have processes for running on shoestrings, but still running, until normal support can be restored.

How do you process cards with hand cranks ?

Also these days I think you're legally required to use some sort of government fiscalisation service where each receipt is uploaded as issued or something like that.

There are small handheld readers for cards with chip/RFID + PIN. I've started seeing some being used here (EU) in such emergencies.

They're pretty cheap, I even have one myself.

I've seen businesses in the US use these things during power outages. https://www.possupply.com/model-4850-flatbed-credit-card-imp...

Most of my cards aren't embossed at this point. They'd have to write the information by hand.

In Norway the CEO(? I don't know his exact title) of the countrys national bank gas demanded that everyone keep supporting cash for the foreseeable future or face fines.

I find that to be a smart move.

Not everyone is paying attention. I went past a shop in Tønsberg last week that had a sign saying that they do not accept cash. Quite a few buses here in Norway do not accept cash at the moment in order to reduce the driver's risk risk of catching COVID.

I know. It will be interesting to see if he manage to continue his hard line after the pandemic.

I really hope so.

Is it ok if I ask if you live near Tønsberg?

If not, just pretend you didn't see this message :-)

Of course, you may always ask anything. But I won't promise to always answer.

In this case the answer is that I live in Drammen.

May I ask why you want to know, and what you will do with this information?

> May I ask why you want to know, and what you will do with this information?

Sure. The reason I asked was that I just want to get a feeling for who all you folks are. Also since I live in Horten it would have been the closest one I knew except people at work.

As for what I want to do with the information I guess it depended on the answer, but probably nothing.

If there was a place to meet HNers near home or work I'd probably visit it once a year or something (depending on how it turned out the first time).

I wonder if there is a map showing where HNers are? Or if it would be possible to create one.

That wouldn't work as 98% of all Swedish customers pay with their debit and credit cards and don't have any cash on them.

Well, perhaps they should just bring the cash then. I find it incredible naive to just do away with cash in society.

It’s already effectively been done away with, and it would be a multi-year societal change to bring it back. I’ve been living in Sweden for four years, and I think that’s about the same number of times I’ve even seen a coin or note.

It's far more common in the US and I certainly see it on a regular basis. But, personally, I'll go months without using it and if I'm driving somewhere I'll have some cash in the car but don't usually carry it on my person.

That train has left the station a long time ago. In Sweden, debit cards are the most common payment method at stores. Most legit companies don't want cash. It just exposes a lot of people for the risk of being robbed.

The official reason is that they want to control crime. The unofficial reason is that they want to be able to track everything people do with money.

Forgot to add... They want to be able to make anyone unable to buy anything at the click of a button. Sweden is pretty much there already so now we are hoping the government doesn't turn into fascism because then we are completely unable to do anything. Keep your guns, America.

Handling cash is expensive for stores. They need to store the cash safely in-store, deploys all kinds of security measures to prevent robberies and theft, use armored cars to transport to and from the bank, pay more in insurance, etc.

GDPR and other laws are supposed to stop that, and has worked out nicely according to audits. Stores are not allowed to keep your credit card number just a reference number. (But a lot of clubs are now registered on the credit card so they can still conncet a sale to a person with out storing the credit card number.)

"they" huh? and who gave you the unofficial reason btw?

Is robbery that widespread in Sweden?

It was very common to rob money transfers back in the days. It kind of peaked around the big helicopter robbery +10 years ago. The use of cash has been on a decline for decades. The transports are never armed like in other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4stberga_helicopter_robb...

It never was common but all the cash management and security measures quickly add up in terms of costs.

Why would they? They just go to a competing supermarket chain instead.

It’s less about doubled setups and more about downtime procedures that don’t have to be perfect but get you by to stay functioning at some level.

Agreed, pretty much every physical operation (stores, logistics, etc) should have plans to continue operating when their IT is down. Losing access to dynamic pricing and loyalty discounts is better than closing up entirely.

This gets hard in no cash society, like what Sweden is already.

Any POS terminal should be able to work with power only. There’s probably a dusty manual somewhere telling you how to configure it for the store to enable it and allow the cashier to type in an amount owing and then hand to the customer and queue payments for upload when network connectivity comes back.

Might lose some payments to overdrafts or cancelled cards. But they lived with that with credit cards up until 2000ish.

Buy-on-board on Aircraft and trains take advantage of this.

Offline payments is baked into EMV payments. It can at least verify the PIN and that the card was valid at its last phone-home.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mastercard+emv+offline+payme...

with pen and paper books can be kept

But you cannot pay with a pen at a cash registry

You can't, I can at certain registries in my town.

It’s a co-op store. They know who you are.

It’s a co-op by name only. These days, Coop’s just a regular supermarket.

This should be illegal.

Coop the store chain is owned by a cooperative association (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kooperativa_F%C3%B6rbundet) so would say it is legit still.

Why on earth should a member-owned structure be limited to some little store where everyone knows everyone? In the US some fairly large organizations, including juice makers Ocean Spray and outdoor chain REI, are co-ops.

Just because the organization is a co-op (of co-ops in the case of the overall parent org) doesn't mean it knows all members of the public that go shopping there.

It doesn't mean they socially know everyone that shows up, but every member would have paid some amount to buy (a) share(s), at least that's how coops work where I am. Plus accumulated dividends. That's a relative barrier to fraud if they decided to issue credit to members.

You could still fraud hit them in this circumstance, but they have some kind of info printed on your card with your name on it and how long you've been a member, and somewhere in the background, a phone# and address.

If one wanted to commit retail crime, easier to just take stuff and walk out without paying.

They are not limited to members of a participating co-op. Everyone can go shopping there.

> [..] more about downtime procedures that don’t have to be perfect [..]

Once, while waiting to check in for a British Airways flight from Manchester (UK), I noticed several large plastic boxes behind the check-in counters labelled "manual check-in".

Presumably someone at BA not only thought about but actually implemented a plan for how to check in passengers when (not if) all the check-in computers go down.

Airlines are fairly immune to technical problems because their systems are so terrible already. Accidental chaos engineering

Coop were handing out bread here today like some disaster movie. But ICA and several other stores are still open so I really don't take this too seriously.

This is a classic case of layered out sourcing as I'd like to call it, and no redundancy. They'll learn.

That's overly dramatic. We just go to another company brand chain to shop. Plenty of those, so no worries, at least until all food shops run out of food... :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com