I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
signalandsilence.substack.com
signalandsilence.substack.com
Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to be a misconfiguration or update sent incorrectly.
That said, the timing of the disclosure and the issue are rather concerning.
Regarding the highest value targets to hit with an attack like this, you would want to target Guam, Hawai'i, and other isolated overseas locations where this would have ripple effects in the local economy. Guam specifically would cause catastrophic supply shortages, since DeCA probably supplies around 50% of the groceries on that island (that's a WAG based on my time there).
Hawaii I'm not sure why that would be an issue unless the whole island was attacked or shut down. Even if the on-base shops were hacked you could just go shop at Wal-Mart or Costco or any number of other locations on the islands. If there was an extended issue then the commander could authorize meal stipends as they do for some units today and then you would just go buy food off-base. Ideal? No. Manageable? Very much.
One of the reasons for consitency above all else is to use the power of history.
Ahistorical is now the defacto standard. All asdumptions about America power are toilet paper.
In other words, this comment is rather meaningless when read plainly - I mean that factually, not as an insult.
The Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain got flattened.
But at the same time, it's not like that came out of nowhere. If you attack a country, that country shooting back at any military installations in missile range has to be one of the expected outcomes. Given the US had all the initiative in starting the conflict I would have hoped there was a logistics plan that involved not relying on those bases to continue to exist
Anyone with the capability to plan for the Iran war never would have started it because the costs would have been obvious. In other words the only way to start a war with Iran is to have no plan for it.
Not only that, but it was already that way for ~40 years, where past presidencies all knew and documented why it was a stupid idea, didn't press the stupidity-button, and mostly worked towards better options.
All Trump needs is a little dangling of glory and publicity and he'd oink like a pig if he thought it'd earn it. Pathetic creature.
Netanyahu tried the same schtick he's done for 30 years of POTUS's, just now we have someone retarded enough to fall for it and a party that allowed him to be surrounded by sycophants.
You should just admit you voted for a retard and pay your penance to your countrymen and species.
Gosh, if only they could've stopped it!
> Foreign influence and realized threats of assasination seem to be a factor.
The only head of state assassinated in this conflict was Iran's.
Have you seen the people responsible for planning right now? They're more concerned with posting AI generated memes on twitter and scoring bigotry points than managing a foreign conflict.
No, it doesn't. It's now in Thailand for R&R, then back to base in the US, because of this issue.
https://apnews.com/article/thailand-singapore-us-aircraft-ca...
> What's causing us to lose is failure to achieve victory due to the means employed…
Right. We're being too restrained. That's some Vietnam War era cope you're huffing.
Yes, that is the point everyone has been trying to make.
Also, to be clear, a land invasion isn't "too costly". It's suicidal because we're talking about a massive country that has been preparing for decades, has a terrain advantage and literally more than a million fanatics ready to die for the regime. You'd need millions of soldiers deployed, and are looking at some Operation Downfall level expected losses.
Also... a million fanatics ready to die for the regime? Maybe. Maybe some of them value their lives.
We've dealt with fanatics multiple times whether that's Japanese willing to die for the emperor or Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East trying to get their 72 virgins. Nobody in the US is scared of dealing with fanatics. Been there, done that. Iran is more mountainous and the terrain is a challenge but the major population centers aren't hidden in bunkers in the hills. Iran is also not landlocked, and unlike, for example, Afghanistan, we would be dealing with a population that has familiarity with the modern world and has at times even protested en masse against the current government of Iran.
Again, none of that is to suggest we should or politically could "invade Iran", and of course I don't think it's necessary to achieve any of our goals, but let's not put Iran on a pedestal either.
The Basij militia has more than a million men in it alone (officially it has 20+ million but more neutral sources pin the number around a million), and this is the organisation that was doing unarmed human wave attacks against Iraq to defend the Iranian revolution. It's also a theocracy with a religion that has martyrdom as a thing.
If anything, a million fanatics ready to die for the regime is probably an understatement.
> We've dealt with fanatics multiple times whether that's Japanese willing to die for the emperor or Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East trying to get their 72 virgins. Nobody in the US is scared of dealing with fanatics
And Japan surrendered because the Emperor said so. If Operation Downfall had to be done instead, you'd have millions of American and Allied casualties.
If you're not scared of this, you aren't paying attention.
> Iran is more mountainous and the terrain is a challenge but the major population centers aren't hidden in bunkers in the hills
Bombing population centres has never resulted in military victory. It has occasionally, alongside military reversals, contributed to political leaders deciding they can't continue (Hirohito, Milosevic), but it would be delusional to hope that Iran's Supreme Leader, sone of the previous one who got bombed out of existence, and again, is a religious leader part of a religion with martyrdom, would be impressed by the US bombing "his" people.
The public being against the war is just about where the comparison between the war in Iran and Vietnam loses meaning.
The United States doesn't need to depose the current Iranian government on its own. An economic blockade could do that, or at worst simply deprive the Iranian government of the means to financially carry out war. As Iran is now finding out, the Strait wasn't quite the leverage that they, and pundits and internet commentators thought it was, and now the US isn't even interested in negotiating which is causing Iran to lash out. It'll be a slow, but certain death to the economy and such an event and blame rests squarely on the shoulders of those in charge of Iran and their idiotic and undemocratic beliefs. The world can't be held hostage and won't be. Though of course the fact that the United States yet again has to go police the world is a bit like a reservoir that slowly refills. There's only so much we're going to be able to do and we're seeing ongoing populist MAGA and DSA backlash against the war. The next crises the US may not be able to respond to politically and then we're in relationship trouble.
This sounds like the sort of "quasi-religious point of view" you're slamming, considering it's been tried repeatedly already without great success.
We haven't ever tried this level of economic isolation with Iran. The closest would be North Korea. If you wanted to attempt to make it sound as though I was parroting a quasi-religious point of view, you would want to argue (which I haven't because it's incorrect) that I'm looking at what happened with North Korea (a regime that exists to terrorize the world thanks to communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union) and that I'm saying all blockades or economic sanctions will work just like that, which is, of course, nonsense, just as comparing Iran to Vietnam today is.
This is your best example? The now nuclear power that's resisted the approach you advocate since the 1950s?
See? Quasi-religious.
I'd encourage you to re-read my comment to see how I drew that distinction.
??
What does this even mean? It seems to come out of nowhere. Is it a reference to some event??
We can all agree on your opening.
Americans make war on other people, other people don't make war on Americans. It's one of the reasons why they are so eager to do so. 'The other guys might hit back' doesn't even register in the cultural psyche.
Eg who armed the Mujahideen?
But the US won and have and have a peace agreement. Several times.
The largest cargo aircraft with the strengthened landing gear, arresting hook, and catapult attachment used to be the C-2 Greyhound. It had a range of approximately 1,500 miles with a 10,000 pound cargo. It was retired on July 28th, 2026. The C-2 has been replaced by the CMV-22B Osprey. It has a range of only 1,150 miles and a more limited cargo capacity of only 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds isn't nothing, but it's not a lot either.
There's not a lot of stuff within 1,150mi of the Arabian Sea. Your two options are one of the US bases in the southern Persian Gulf (Kuwait is too far) and Diego Garcia. Neither are ideal. In both cases you're doing a transfer out in the field.
On the other hand, the C-5 Galaxy can carry 120,000 pounds to a range of 4,800 miles. You can fill it with food in the continental US, fly to Hickam AFB in Hawaii, refuel, and fly the rest of the way to Guam. On the return leg, an unladen C-5 can fly directly to the 22nd Airlift Squadron's home base California without a layover.
The C-17B Globemaster is smaller than the C-5, although it's nearly as capable. With a 160,000 pound cargo, it has a range of 3,200 miles, (the C-17A has a shorter range) which is just short of the 3,800 miles to get from Hawaii to Guam. I don't know how much cargo it's capable of carrying 3,800 miles, but on the order of 100,000 pounds is a reasonable guess. It is also capable of an empty flight back to the US without a layover.
I can't speak to how much cargo was on board, but I did a Hawai'i to Guam leg on a C-17B that was carrying palletized cargo.
One of my better Space-A experiences. Crew was great, flight was smooth. I preferred it over the KC-135 leg, despite the more spartan conditions. The aircrew let us toss out sleeping bags and packs in the aisles between cargo and get some sleep.
It's also roughly 2800 nautical miles from Kuwait to Diego Garcia, so regardless of where the carrier group is, it should be at most a ~6 day round trip at 20 knots for a supply ship from the closest of the two.
That assumes there is no way to airdrop watertight pallets of food (e.g. steel drums loaded with cans and MREs) into the water, then retrieve it with RHIBs or helicopters.
In such a situation I expect you'd have a lot of other stuff competing with food for that lift, too, like spare parts.
Trying to stand it up in an emergency now is asking for trouble.
You'd have to be in a really dire situation to risk the carrier and aircraft this way.
They're not striking the entire air wing below just so one C-130 can land and take off, and that's assuming a stunt pulled by one elite test pilot was replicable by a bog-standard junior C-130 pilot.
It's been the basis for at-sea supply of long-endurance ships since ~1910 when refueling oil became a key blue sea naval requirement.
Modern example: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/kzncvGBj-88
Mostly tensioned cables carrying hoses (liquids especially fuel being the highest volume / limiting factor), some palletized transfer over cables, and some helicopter lift (because the flight pads/decks are already sitting next to each other while everyone is waiting for fuel to finish).
Analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSYl9y3e944
Also, the Navy is using Ospreys to resupply submarines at sea because they have the range and helicopters don't.
Afaik, modern submarines handle terribly on the surface, so I imagine direct ship-to-ship UNREP is rare. Also, too much cost risk from a collision.
Per YouTube, it's mostly vertical replenishment. Helicopter for short range. Osprey for longer. Floating pallets pushed out of the back of a C-17 at max range.
I'm sure the packing is intricate for something that's going to be air dropped, then floating, then has to be broken down on an unstable floating platform and conveyed inside through small ports!
Why does it seem like the US always retires useful hardware and replaces it with less useful hardware?
The complete lack of frigates in the US navy is another example of this.
Giving how static bases (including airstrips) have become vulnerable, i think we may yet to see those flying boats coming back as a way to support Navy fleets which historically were relying on the static bases.
Supercarriers came into existence at ~70,000t and transitioned to ~100,000t. You'd need to scale another step up or three, to 140,000t, 200,000t, or 280,000t, in order to see something capable of landing and taking off a cargo-laden C-130 in regular operations.
In a war with another major power resources would be stretched thin and depriving bases of food would reduce combat effectiveness.
Also these same things apply to any other major power (perhaps more so) who would also see their resources stretched then and their bases deprived of food to reduce combat effectiveness.
Are these materially different? Assuming that there wasn't a literal command to turn off all freezers, from an organizational, non criminal perspective, to the organization the damage will be the same, the root cause will be a bug (whether exploited by chance or malice), and the fix will be the same(fixing the bug).
A hack implies an adversary, and intentional targeting.
The thesis "everything hackable" will be hacked, and with the advent of hacking LLMs, the boundary between criminal hacking and civil hacking is being blurred, it's no longer attributable to a criminal intent, hacking commands are just something that happens through no criminal intent.
Practically, the hackers, whether human or syntehtic, are a catalyst, they accelerate the rate at which a bug that causes damage will manifest, and perhaps the magnitude of the manifestation, but the essence of the negative manifestation of that bug is the same. Whether it was triggered by a solar ray flipbit or by a rogue LLM or by a russian hacker, the essence of the issue is the same.
If it was a mistake, it happened at many facilities. That seems like a repeated mistake to me.
As per the article that's literally a selling feature
But a misconfiguration is even more likely.
Can’t think _why_ freezers need to be web connected and remotely managed in the first place. What benefits does that bring the commissary in normal operation?
Tada. It saves someone from making the rounds with a clipboard and writing down temps every X hours.
I agree its unneeded, just I can see the thought process.
We see that in commercial aviation a lot which is why when there’s so much as 2 instances of a similar failure within a short timespan investigators start looking more closely at maintenance and manufacturing.
These two states are indistinguishable from each other. A good hack looks like a poorly configured maintenance update, and vice versa.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hp-warns-that...
It's really just bad journalism.
Pretending that hacks and damage are all preplanned in advance with a room of military scientist programmers as a way to dismiss the notion is silly. These will be attacks based on in-the-moment opportunity, not specifc preplanning for each attack.
I opened Siemens TIA Portal and PLCSIM for the first time and thought “wow, I didn’t think the Windows 95 GUI library was still supported.” None of the PLC contractors we had hired knew how to enable TLS on the thing (user/pass eg admin/admin was their usual). Anecdote: I once spent hours reading the docs and clicking around trying to get it to accept an SSL certificate signed by a real CA and it wouldn’t go, but it accepted one I self-signed in openssl.
In all fairness, the people who are experts in the field of Siemens PLC programming are usually mechanical-ish engineers and security is not in their skill set or on their mind.
On my project the service I wrote was doing bidirectional communication with the PLC over OPCUA. The server running this pod was connected to the internet, so it was critical to have proper TLS for the OPCUA client/server. Rotating LetsEncrypt certs on the system every 45 days is a lot of toil, but using a self-signed cert that expires in 2040 from some dev laptop doesn’t pass muster in most organizations either.
That’s just the OPCUA path.. In these projects You also typically see WinCC HMIs that can talk to the PLC from anywhere on the network without TLS. And also SIMATIC Web Server pages - minimally secured by default, and the amount of info you can grok about the system in Chrome Dev Tools is troubling.
What is unique about your system using LetsEncrypt that you can't automate certbot to handle this task as it was designed and intended to be done?
Some PLCs run extremely expensive machines. Some machines can't afford to have their control systems stutter or fail because that can lead to physical damage and production outages of enormous proportions. A PLC that stops communicating because a certificate just expired is absolutely not acceptable in some plants.
Running certbot on a random PLC isn't happening.
admin/admin is on a post-it stuck to the monitor because everyone we hire is perfectly capable of rooting a machine they have physical access to.
Having an actual password prevents people "borrowing" a key to the equipment broom closet from "optimizing" some config values they really shouldn't be messing around with.
The PLC engineers I had contact with usually had an electrical engineering background. That's why they like PLCs in the first place with the ladder logic programming languages, grafcet and if they feel fancy a bit of structured text (assembly like) or structured control language (pascal like). They indeed did not know much about software security but a great deal about machine safety.
A real security nightmare are older OPC servers (OPC-DA) which is super reliant on DCOM. OPC is quite important to connect the PLCs to SCADA systems or 3rd party devices.
Then someone plugs in a cable because boss wants something "over there" and there's already a network that runs "over there". Or optimizes to a smart switch with vlans, and then someone else optimizes to a single vlan. It's not hard to not give a shit, or not understand, network security.
We often forget this, but computer software and hardware are engineering disciplines. Part of engineering is knowing when something's bad and telling the person who asked you to do that something that you won't do it. In the civil engineering world, this means you might have to just walk away from the project and blow a whistle before people get hurt or killed. It's time to normalize that in IT.
It doesn't have to wait 20 years for someone to come through engineering school to happen.
In reality it'll likely first be noticed ten years down the line, by someone who lets out a big sigh, mutters something about "incompetent dipshits not updating documentation", and moves on with their day.
I'm saying that's what you do in order to solve the issue. You have to actually try, and you have to do actual engineering.
If the local planning commission submits a call for proposals for a bridge to cross a 400 foot chasm over sharp rocks, and they insist that it absolutely, positively must be made out of popsicle sticks, local civil engineering firms aren't going to take up the project, because that's insane.
Why do we give the management of these places a pass for PLC and SCADA systems that could give massive problems - up to and including the loss of human life - if they're hacked?
Not really dissimilar from the human upbringing: leave a baby with "bad" guardians, and it will grow up corrupted. That's a feature, not a bug: if you knew what behaviour exactly you wanted (other than "whatever Simon says"), you would just bake it in in the first place, right?
Stuxnet was over a decade ago.
There should be a simple rule that everyone with the ability to understand things like PLCs should be able to grasp: your equipment does not touch the internet or external storage, period.
Those who can't grasp this concept should be shown the door with a recommendation that they find a less mentally-taxing line of work.
The worm was designed to jump across network air gaps via USB flash drives, and spread across isolated networks to other hosts. Finally, it targeted what was likely going to be a service technician laptop, which had to connect to the PLC via a data cable to update and adjust its configuration.
An attack like this can only be avoided if you never transfer any data from the outside to the inside. But that means you won't ever be able to install any form of software update or upload new config files without manually typing them in - or even reinstall the OS on any machine...
Fact is if the customer wants to put their worksite management on AWS, you inevitably expose the OPC server and/or PLC to a Intranet. This is then inevitably connected to the internet in some way. The customer may or may not put barriers between them, but that's not up to us to decide.
This becomes especially a problem if they have multiple sites across a country or countries.
We have a customer that runs a factory on god forsaken WIFI, then dares to complain about a bad connection to said equipment. Thankfully, they have their own internal IT department.
Now with the EU cyber resiliency act things are moving but I think it's infeasible for many sites to meet modern security standards, because of both hardware and software.
Because a half dozen a day sounds plausible as standard maintenance issues, as the author acknowledges. If it were a hack, I'd expect something like 50% of them to have problems. But not knowing how many there are, I don't know how significant these incidents really are.
I've seen batch failures in radio equipment where I could predict 100% accurately which devices would fail based on the range of serial numbers.
Not just any failure, specifically heating the food (defrost) so it goes bad. Happening overnight, so it wouldn't be caught before it's too late.
All that could still be a coincidence, but the more coincidences start to pile up the more we have to consider other possibilities too. I do agree it would be unusual to 'waste' a vuln like that, but perhaps the implant/CVE was about to be exposed anyway.
Interesting times...
Considering Iran is looking for any possible avenue to make the US look bad especially directly before an election with a president who cheerleads the military strongly while not actually putting the time or thought into what makes it strong.
This would be worth far more than the vulnerability itself to Iran right now. No real injuries causing escalation. Making a more capability adversary look foolish.
according to the article, the denominator is ~235.
An attack like the author hypothesized would require a LOTL modus operandi, and doing so on 14 locations wouldn't justify completely blowing up an entire LOTL operation, because it exposes indicators, registers, and tradecraft that is then shared amongst all security vendors.
The way it's framed is clickbait at its worst with the added issue of limited security experience, but the same can be said of HN in general.
The problem is the author should have put a few concise bullet points at the top. (14 freezers failed at the same time. They are all internet-controlled, and failed at the same time as a disclosure about a vulnerability. They all failed by turning on the defrost cycle and heating food.)
I really recommend skimming the article to the end.
(Unfortunately, the article really is so verbose it's a borderline rant.)
In my mind, if this was a hack, it was probably not a Stuxnet virus or something. These are smart fridges we're talking about - someone probably just logged into them using leaked credentials or a Web app vuln, and turned them off.
"Every nonelectric cooler comes with 25 years of free real-time monitoring. On a visit to the company in the spring of 2012, I watched as technicians in Broad Air’s space-age control room checked on the performance of its units in locations as diverse as the Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport in Spain; Qualcomm headquarters in San Diego, California; and Fort Stewart, the U.S. Army base in Georgia [emphasis added].
"Zhang says that 80 percent of his clients are repeaters. “If you bring long-term benefits for your clients, they will choose you.”"
Not just in the sense of secretive kill-switches, but "US government commands you to turn over this encryption key and you're not allowed to say you did so" stuff.
That barely even registers given the scale of more modern escalations against its 'allies'. Escalations like "US government threatens that you aren't a real country and that you can't defend yourself from it."
But, I'd be a lot more inclined to that idea if it wasn't for how they failed: they started a defrost cycle that turned the freezers into heaters, spoiling the food quicker. And the failure happened overnight, delaying discovery of the problem.
It could be just a compounding of bad luck. But an attacker with access to the specs for the freezers might be aware of how long they would stay cold after being simply shut off.
Wanted to offer a few clarifications:
I’m not a cybersecurity expert; I’m an investigator (in a totally different field), and this was essentially me following a weird thought to see where it went. My background is in natsec so that’s where my mind goes. There have since been at least dozens of additional freezer outages reported in a similar pattern, but I'm refraining from calling/tracking down every individual weirdness based on a Facebook comment at this point since there are much larger outlets with journalists more proficient than I covering this by now. Another interesting thing - There are numerous freezers and fridges within base stores, not under the control of DeCA/DoD, and none of those appear to be impacted.
I completely agree that a bad update/configuration or other shared technical failure may be the much more boring answer. The interesting part to me is that potentially hundreds of varying systems can converge upstream into common monitoring/control infrastructure. Anyone on this forum probably understands that, however IoT was something that was a relatively new concept when I was in school, and my degrees were somewhat relevant. The average person is blissfully unaware how expansive (and how much work behind safeguarding) the IoT is.
Also, since it came up: Yup. Human written. I’m pretty firmly anti-AI as a writer and also just, like, societally. I'll be sure to add some sort of footnote detailing my ai usage at the bottom of future public facing work, because I too detest reading (or questioning if what I'm reading is) slop. Minimal LLM used for understanding technical concepts and what the fuck fridge norms are…The weird formatting, excessive bolding, neurotic parentheticals, and rant energy are, unfortunately, totally my own. Sorry guys.
This was my first ever public post and intended audience was ~ 10 friends forced to read my diatribe, not thousands of strangers very validly raising questions I am not smart enough to answer myself. Appreciate the discussion and will be further educating myself on some of the points a few of you have brought up.
My main question was "did Claude do the investigation by itself or just write up the article from someone's notes?"
Also though, I'm quite willing to believe this is human written and the human just happens to have a Claudey style. The actual prose isn't that Claudey it's just the structure of how it presents ideas. But, Claude had to get that structure from somewhere. It's not that surprising to see people with that style of communication.
I did all the digging, researching, writing, etc myself. The reason the screenshots are from mobile is because I wrote a lot of it literally in my notes app, on my phone before I started putting together more dots. I eventually asked gpt if I was correct in my understanding about refrigeration controllers doing XYZ and if it was plausible for them to be hacked in this way, when looking for some docs I asked if it would be standard to have XYZ part of a contract public and XYZ private, and other singular questions like that. I also use a browser extension for spellcheck that (I think) uses AI to suggest phrasing improvements, which I used pretty nominally.
Is there any type of sidebar/footnote that you, as a reader, would like to see to denote AI usage during the writing and/or research process? Would you expect none? I don't plan to do many investigations such as this (literally started because I was personally impacted) but I do have a few potential article seeds about defense procurement tech I've asked a few definition/research questions to AI about and would like to make sure I'm keeping tabs on it since this is something I want to be perhaps hyper aware of moving forward. Keeping in mind this is my personal substack and I would like to maintain integrity, but also, not doing really any groundbreaking work here. Intended to be an outlet for my thoughts, not news.
It's not something I expect, but I definitely don't see an issue with people putting a couple of sentences in an "expand to see AI usage notes" tab at the top or bottom of the page.
> Would you expect none?
As in, would I expect no AI usage? Coz no I absolutely expect people to use AI.
If you had got Claude to do this investigation for you then actually I think that would have been notable enough to include details of your AI workflow. But not because "it's cheating not to disclose it", rather because you'd probably have come up with quite a neat workflow that is interesting in its own right.
It's definitely suspicious. My money is on inside job — perhaps someone not fond of the current administration's handling of things. In my experience, these types of vulnerabilities are well-known and kept in the back pocket of engineers that have a lot of experience maintaining the equipment. Everywhere I've worked has been deeply vulnerable in some way, all of the engineers knew it, and often joked about it or were counting the days to getting pwned because companies never like to spend money to address the issue. I'm sure the military is no different. Probably worse.
Regardless if this was a hack or a bug, the bigger lesson is that overcomplicated systems fail in catastrophic ways. Why do military commissaries need remote-controlled freezers? It seems like a very fragile, and needless, way to run a freezer.
---
But, there are some options that the author didn't consider:
1: This could be a quickly applied patch that failed.
2: This could be a "script kiddie" hack from someone who isn't a government actor.
I'm less onboard with a state actor. Generally, when a state actor has hacked something, they don't want the victim to know. In this case, if it was a state actor, I would anticipate that they would make a single freezer fail in a way that they could verify using something like a hacked video camera or otherwise by watching public social media feeds. IMO: A state actor would only "make sense" if they knew the hole was closing soon and they don't care if they're discovered, perhaps because their operation is winding down.
Unfortunately, I would wager that all BAS software is full of flaws and holes, allowing access to it for the public internet seems like a bad idea. I need to be on my company VPN to access our locally hosted BAS front end (which I have authorized access for) which seems like the bare minimum security.
Could be the Iranians, or someone aligned, conducting anti-morale operations. Could be the start of a series of small but annoying failures.
But if I was an Iranian operative with instructions to damage the morale of the American war machine, I'd absolutely do a series of things like this.
It doesn't really harm anyone, but enough similar events and the families of servicemembers start to feel unsafe, which is psychologically very different than the servicemembers themselves feeling unsafe.
It's probably more benign than that, most likely firmware or a central controller failure, but still
I'm sure some script kiddie broke into a government network, hacked an industrial process, and forced a limited supply piece of equipment into a failure mode that takes some thought and is more unique as an attack vector. It's just like buying hacks for CS source right?
I’ve seen similar too many times in my career - synchronized clocks are great until someone deploys a cronjob that fires at exactly the same time across the fleet and it breaks a certain OS or firmware revision. Which then exposes another bug that exists globally.
I definitely still subscribe to don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence mindset.
Certainly all speculation though, real root cause will be interesting if it ever becomes public.
Doesn’t require and patching at all. These things lurk for years or decades before finally meeting the conditions needed to be exposed. Many times one-off failures that underwrote the issue are written off as hardware failure or whatnot and not actually diagnosed until something like this happens.
This is food storage for a commissary, aka a store. They don’t use residential refrigerators.
But pretty much any grocery store with multiple refrigerated/freezer cases is going to have an automation system that runs it.
… the article does posit this … nonsensically. TFA also establishes that "RMCS" stands for "Remote monitoring and control system". I would think the "and control" portion of the acronym would indicate that it is centralized monitoring … and control.
Could be a hack or a design flaw. I await the root cause analysis.
It's also possible that, because the US is busy bombing Iran, Iran may be busy attacking the US infrastructure in any way possible? The US is also in a tepid war with russia, last I checked.
Some "cyber" crew getting a shell on an outsourced service provider and running a "defrost" command is also a totally explanation for this situation. It's also totally possible that some crew has mapped out a list of PLC entry points for various orgs and has them in a spreadsheet of "if we find a vulnerability, we should X this Y with this prestaged script that our intern / LMM cooked up last year to defrost these freezers"
I'm guessing Iran will claim it as an attack even if it doesn't end up being them in the end.
But the thing I can’t get past is Fort Huachuca’s failure mode.
Not: the freezer compressor died.
Not: the power went out.
Not even: the refrigeration system stopped cooling.
Every freezer went into active defrost.No LLM use while writing, except for my grammar/phrasing plugin which I think (?) uses AI. I detailed my explicit usage cases for gpt in an earlier comment above.
Is there anything you, as a skeptical reader, would like to disclaimed/posted/footnoted when it comes to disclosing gpt usage during research questions, etc?
Wasn’t planning to have to address this early on but I would love to moving forward, especially time listener, first time caller to the online writing publication world, especially in the era of rampant AI usage.
(Keeping in mind that this is my personal substack meant to be an anthology series of my thoughts and rabbit-holed interest write ups, not exactly intended for such wide scrutiny but, I guess, could be potentially disseminated widely in a rare instance such as this first post, lol)
Please don't say confirmed. AI detectors are not reliable in any way.
There doesn't seem to be anything indicating an advanced attack. If you're a foreign adversary and you want to flex your muscles (in a way that would be a borderline act of war), you don't just flip one switch and giggle about spoiled food.
We know there's been a severe rot of operational capabilities in the military thanks for Hegseths purges and general stupidity. It's entirely possible and quite likely that over the course of his various drunken binges he decided to get rid of people who were in charge of operational control for stuff like freezers across military bases.
“If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them.” —Sun Tzu, The Art of War
"some of that stuff might become dinner" is splitting hairs, I feel.
Why? Because disruptions along the supply line are disruptions along the supply line. If a deep Russian ammo depot had a sudden smoking accident, you would (rightly) think it absurd for a Russian mil-blogger to quip that "technically we didn't lose ammo, the fuses are put in right before firing, we lost stuff that might become ammo." Seems less convincing now, right?
Maybe tonight's meal isn't disrupted, but the weekly meal planning is certainly disrupted. I hate to say it, but if the intent was an opportunistic hit to troop morale before a CVE got burned anyway, I'd say mission accomplished. :(
If this does turn out to be an attack, it's from decades of higher-ups ignoring cybersecurity coming home to roost.
This appears to be happening stateside, and most, if not all, of the listed bases have nearby grocery stores (I'm saying most based on the ones I recognize and know where they are, I didn't look up the rest). This is an annoyance, not a massive disruption.
Honestly, it probably creates more disruption for the retirees in the areas around the bases than it does the local active duty members.
I agree that it is an important role that would be worthy of disruption for a motivated attacker.
But also: These things aren't usually at the center of vast food deserts. There's typically other ways to find some grub, like the Wal-Mart right over there.
Maybe the mode they got stuck on was defrost.
if n>100 then defrost until y=3
The internet security practices I experienced when working with the DOD in a prior life were…interesting?
Outside of the classified realm, there seemed to be little to no on the ground understanding of the Internet. Many things where internet connected that shouldn’t be or weren’t that should. I was involved in one contract where we had to demonstrate the ability to remotely access and control a system (to satisfy the system’s owner) as well as demonstrate that the system could not be remotely accessed via the internet (to satisfy the base IT folks). The solution was a hotspot kept in a lock box…that I doubt was ever locked after we left because it was constantly attached to our internal monitoring network despite our pleas.
I was curious if this was continued evidence of poor appropriations and upkeep or what... I do see "U.S. military commissary refrigeration maintenance, equipment replacement, and physical infrastructure are funded through the 5% commissary surcharge paid by customers at checkout rather than direct congressional appropriations."
So, perhaps the first place would be to follow the money - are these being repaired at the proper rate? Is this repair outsourced to third party vendors? (my guess). Is this gonna end up being the McDonald's Ice Cream machine all over again?
Really though, Hanlon's would be much easier to believe this is yet further ineptitude by those who run things (I am not going to claim malfeasance/malevolence, except a general sense of such across the board by this admin).
Since I'm not on the inside, anything I have to say would be speculative, just like the above, or the author themselves (I have no idea who it is, and perhaps they have a better beat on the ground with regards to this), but it just falls in line with "we're running out of missiles" and "sailors attempting to kill themselves".
We're so insistent on being #1, we can't admit we're in a society that is falling apart (and again, it may be the case that this IS a hack, but if I were to place my bets...)
Ineptitude, lowest cost players, etc "efficiency" indeed. You get what you pay for, and I guess 5% don't pay for a whole hell of a lot these days.
And yes, remember you can explain everyting by adding enough dimensions to a game of chess. But in reality? Seems the upside is near zero while the dowside is sacrifising your access.
Maybe a kid just wanted to do it for fun? Maybe a smaller hacking group who would just like to make a statement against fascist/imperialist USA is happy to just cost them a few million dollars with a few network packets?
Now, considering how the OpenAI/HF hack emerged out of nowhere, it might be possible that groups of AI agents might have done this even without any close human supervision.
> "I'm sorry I'm familiar with that function. Let me research enabling defrost for you."
Having remote on/off capability, or even the ability to set temperatures for freezers remotely is just so insanely idiotic, I don't get it. Why even have the path? If the temp is wrong, go investigate.
This is such a colossal non-problem. The risk is now, at the start of a war action base supplies could be made unusable.
One of the big current risk scenarios is, all smart cars, all meat packing plants, all industrial capacity, all phones, all internet, all interrupted at precisely the same time. A multi-pronged hack, right at the start of the war.
Imagine all electric cars bursting it flames in garages as they charge overnight. Conjoined with all cell phones, network connectivity, and landlines going out. And 911 call centres.
So now you have a fire raging, the fire department doesn't even know, and if it wanted to respond? There's 4 fires on every suburban block.
Within a few hours, a large portion of the populous now has no housing.
That's just from two simple hacks, communication and electric cars.
The society of always-on-connected is just dumb, stupid, insane, and has threat-results worse than some nuclear exchange scenarios.
And there will never, ever, ever be secure software. Ever. Never going to happen, ever. No rust, no this or that, no AI help, will ever, ever, ever secure software. Ever.
And how do I know this?
Because 50 years later, I've seen software just as buggy, insecure, as it always has. Anyone thinking "oh, we can just do this thing! And then software will be safe" is a loon, it'll never ever happen.
And that means?
Nothing important should ever be network connected, ever.
So why would any yahoo think remote control capacity on a freezer is sane?
A. This technology is inherently crap, that's our fault
B. A bored teenager broke it. Bored teenagers are a thing, it literally doesn't matter which country they are in, stop building things bored teenagers will blow up, this is also inherently our fault
C. Foreign Adversaries
It suits both mass media audience figures and a narrative of wily enemies rather than incompetence to pin everything on C and it seems eminently possible that a country with as many enemies as the US would attract this sometimes, but the reality is that both A and B are much more likely despite being embarrassing.
Not exactly strong evidence presented here, but it wouldn't be a surprise either
But I fear the vested/wealthy interests involved in iot data mining, advertising, "relationship management" and plain "we own this"...
It (probably) prevents a comprehensive law supporting common sense.
"But the thing I can’t get past is Fort Huachuca’s failure mode.
Not: the freezer compressor died.
Not: the power went out.
Not even: the refrigeration system stopped cooling.
Every freezer went into active defrost."
This is a much bigger deal than the freezer being down.
Should be much closer to the top of the article. Otherwise this is just weird and potentially dangerously wrong research.