tomshardware.com
Related:
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
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.
But then, no other kind of auditor do either...
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.
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.
Ive got to disagree there, the mistake is in it not being readonly accessible. Monitoring fridges in such a setting is one of the few times it actually does make sense to put online readonly.
It means someone has to physically go in... So a classic security vs. convenience trade-off.
Amazing
passes the password expiration policy, if they used the full month name and spaces then that would be a combination of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and "special chars". "1 May 2026" is the shortest date i can think of and it's 10 chars in length. not bad, not bad, possible dailywtf material.
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?
It's not like "boom, got u" and then they walk off after destroying some food.
They are doing tons of attacks against all types or physical and digital infra all over Europe.
This is just one of hundreds, thousands happening.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Night
I mean, how dare Estonia not be ecstatic about the Soviet soldiers who kept them thoroughly liberated until 1991.
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.
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 )
millions of dollars of economic damage sure, it doesn't contribute to social upheaval. It's a one time pain in the ass, this seems pretty hysterical tbh
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).
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)
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.
Should we (the EU?) have sent weapons to the Venezuelan opposition in 1999? When exactly did Chávez become a dictator? He was clearly not a democrat (coup attempt in 1992) but I think it would have been premature and unlikely to have had good outcomes if we had done it in 1999 or 2000 (he was democratically elected both times). He was obviously a dictator when he died in 2013 but a large part of the Venezuelan population still hadn't cottoned on to it or they thought it was great.
Iran was similar. The crazies were quite popular in 1979.
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.
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.
Wait, it has its own cellular modem? Nevermind, then.
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.
“Also there are a lot of attacks happening all the time, which ones do you share?”
Completely untrue.
People going to the store to get food that day remember.
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
It's been cartoonish for over a decade. An elderly spoiled rich kid is running the USA into the ground along with his playmates starting wars he said he wouldn't. Another elderly infantile man is upset one of his vassal states had a tantrum and invaded it. Some other children got really angry after a terrorist attack and retaliated with 100x casualties in a "nah nah nah we got more bombs than you." A shrewd child is turning his industrial power house into a large technopanopticon while selling it to other nations along with debt traps all while eyeing a former sovereign territory for takeover.
At this point I would rather vote for actual cartoon characters like Daffy Duck or Goofy. Duck Season FIRE!
Last night, after Trump told everyone he made an energy peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, Russia attacked Ukraine energy infrastructure and left 600,000 people without power. These attacks on energy will be even more deadly as winter sets in.
Is that cartoonishly evil?
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...
No one has to answer for an obviously dangerous risk, not even the company? Ship it!!!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Or, in other words, you'd expect the managers to be smart enough not to set all the fridges to 50°C, whatever data they read on their screens.
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.
Most of those companies bet on air-gapping their systems and hoping nobody cares enough to hack them
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.
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.
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
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.
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 doubt their security is all that good.
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.
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.
The credits cost a fortune
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
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.
If only…
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 did go ahead and do a query against gemini, and the estimate is 25 cents a box after considering long tail expenses (i.e. fuel, CARB premiums, etc.)
So, Less than you thought and way less than even I initially expected.
Mea culpa on my end, I wonder where the other parts of the price are coming from.
I do have other thoughts, but don't know California labor laws and the like enough to guess.
e.x. I know one big factor in the 'slowing' of inflation of grocery prices in my state over the last 20 years, has been the erosion of pay/benefits for workers. If California is still guaranteeing that for the workers (decent health care, at least a couple weeks of vacation time, etc.) and it's built into the cost... makes sense and TBH I wouldn't hate paying extra for that. Grocers here have with only a few exceptions gotten terrible.
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.
Or "Your reefer is set to 35 degrees but you're hauling chilled beer, we set it to 40 degrees to save fuel"
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.
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.
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.
Of course in a cynical view companies only try to "generate profit" but usually generating profit is tied to providing some sort of service or product, and people like to buy good products
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.
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.
Did everyone forget about Therac-25?
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.
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.
Operators understand how important having them connect to PLCs and various bits because failure can mean you can take out parts of whatever it’s controlling, the power grid, oil pipelines, etc. So, you need to be very aware of what you are doing when you do these upgrades. There’s a lot of process to ensure you don’t break things.
But, you tell them about network security and or having to have Modbus messages wrapped in TLS and some of them will tell you to shut up and get out of their way. These systems have literally been just ported from the equivalent of a PDP/11 to Linux. So, not the most robust things when you come from a network security perspective. They really are 1970s systems and it’s really annoying, but I don’t think there’s any money in really doing anything about it and a lot of people make good money consulting around for these things.
The best systems are implemented either in-house or by a team of consultants working hand-in-glove with the in-house IT or ops teams, then maintained in-house. That's been my experience. Unfortunately your average municipal wastewater plant is probably run on decades-old systems by the same IT dept. that fixes the city council's printer.
No profit in security/dependency upgrades. Propriety SCADA protocols to enforce full stack manufacturer lock in.
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.
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.
> someone will be sent out at night
We're talking about France, so that's an even lower chance of happening for a freezer's worth of goods.
The two upsides I'd see are the ability to throw away the food next day before opening the shop, and the franchise being able to force that procedure even if the local shop would have chosen otherwise.
Local tenant are usually a lot more lenient than their franchise manager (for good reason usually, but there's always that tension)
Russia is feeling the pain of having their warehouses blown up.
There will be tons of budget for having things ‘blow up’ themselves.
Cold War, part Deux - the cybering?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
You can use a modern operating system just fine.
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".
With centralized monitoring, this all becomes much easier, and you can inspect a whole row of freezers in less than a minute. You can even do it remotely, just watching when customers open and close the doors on a security camera and checking that the control system registered it correctly.
See also: dump trucks that have alarms if you start to move while the bed is up. It's a great safety feature on the highway, but it's annoying on the job site if you can't just dump everything out while standing still, so it frequently gets disabled by the workers, especially if it starts to misfire. This is how you end up with dump trucks going highway speeds with their beds up taking out overhead signage and slamming into bridges. The stakes are much higher, yet workers would still rather rip out the alarm.
> it is standard security practices that monitoring and control must live in separate channels for security.
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.
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.
People advocating to do nothing? Saying it's not practical to do anything.
Smells botty to me.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Very likely they were sold on these internet-connected systems without being told about the drawbacks, which is sad.
It’s more costly to do it properly, so most don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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
No power? Internet hackers? No problem! Freezr is here to save the day!
About the 2013 Target data breach, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-...
Lots of completely out of touch comments
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.
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.
I have worked at several different companies, of various sizes. One place sold equipment, 1 machine was between 100 ~ 250k, they usually sold 10 or so a month so revenue would be ~12 million. IT department was 1 guy, he eventually was able to get a helper.
Another place I worked at used to have IT on site at every location, they cut that as a cost savings. It became a small team at corporate HQ, then was outsourced after that. Regional offices and factories worldwide.
A story about their policies; They decided to ban USB drives in the name of security but there was equipment that you needed to get data off that could not be put on the network. Their solution was "Get a computer that we not controlled by IT, Login to Teams on that computer and use it to send the files to yourself."
This is a company that has over 5 billion dollars in revenue...
I think neither revenue nor profit can give you a good idea of what a company's IT ability is.
Myself, I have no idea why the fridges would be on the network/ internet but wouldn't be surprised that the utilities requested it be done.
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.
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.
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.
They cost money, of course.
I want the protected device to be on its own subnet with no plain IP packets passed through. It gets access through an authenticating proxy (speaking TCP and maybe UDP) and maybe through a VPN specific to that device.
Conventional network gear can fudge this by putting each protected device on its own VLAN. This does not scale. It’s also vulnerable to anyone who compromises basically any network device with access to a trunk port.
I would expect my device to be considerably more expensive per port than UniFi. (A VLAN capable UniFi switch port costs about $10.)
There would be no VLAN, just plug the protected device directly into the firewall’s ‘LAN’ port.
A VPN is just a network level proxy for all traffic (roughly speaking), modulo firewall rules.
I’ve done this before. It isn’t even particularly hard to do, assuming the VPN provisioning isn’t a nightmare.
It could be made easier/more commodity of course. I guess we’d need some IoT logic and an app? (Cringes inside)
None of what you just said is particularly relevant to the original statement.
I don't think any goalposts have moved.
Or be actually as secure?
I’m just pointing out these things already exist. You can buy and configure them right now.
At first you seemed to deny it, then it’s ’too hard’? Then ‘oh, but what about feature x or y’?
Pick a lane.
The profit motive absolutely favors neglect, and may even punish attempts at reasonable maintenance
This is a clear example.
I've no idea what they ended up doing after that.
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.
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.
There may be a sensible argument to connect these to the Internet in read-only mode (and from there, poor engineering choices leading to unintended ways to remotely control it). But there are a lot of devices where there is no good reason but everyone tries to cram WiFi and Apps just because they can or because they hope that they'll be able to abuse their users later to make an extra buck. At least those cases need to be discouraged (e.g. by making the companies liable and very publicly bankrupting a number of them).
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.
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)
Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.
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.
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.
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".
More AI -> more slop code -> more attack surfaces that AI can exploit
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.
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.
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.
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...
http.html:"StoreView" https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http.html%3A%22StoreView%...
Total Results: 4,525
> 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.
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...
For me, the old timey Raspberry Pi B+ fits the bill.
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.
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.
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.
...or just have them beep if there is an issue.
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?
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.
How would you feel if someone looted your house and justified it with "you should have used better locks?"
> How would you feel
I would be glad to know that's all that would have stopped them, and use that information to improve my home security.
Um, if everyone needlesly suffered, we'd not have the problem.
Whereas we have in fact generously provided life-enrichment opportunities - to miscreants.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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".
It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...
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.
Why are these fridges on a network? Feels like an easy fix to me but maybe I'm missing something? Unplug?
Not every comment I have is useful sadly but it's weird where the mind goes
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".
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...
> 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...
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-...
Just like in that marvelous Argentinian cartoon "Mercano The Martian", the Idiocracy's little stepbrother.
Not authenticated, no access to any endpoint.
Game over.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
why not put them behind corporate VPN of some kind?
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...
Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.
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.
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.
Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.
Read-only is a strong control with lots of solid implementations.
But this line of discussion is entirely missing my original point.
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?
- 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.
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)
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..
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.
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?).
...and meanwhile, here we have (mostly smaller) supermarkets with decades old "dumb" equipment which would be completely unaffected by such things.
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
Second time this sh*t happens in a week, this website is the pits i swear
My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just can’t help themselves apparently.
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.
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!"
"..."
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.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).
According to an acquaintance who knows him in real life, he lives in Australia but pretends to post from Moscow.
He has a massive chip on his shoulder about Russia and Putin. He complained about FSB and a Russian company trying to kill him back in the day (see wikileaks cables).
He has no reason to be unbiased.
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.
Who attacked Ukraine, again?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
They can't take Kiev but they're threatening Paris.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder where then the millions of soldiers that fought the russian civil war came from.
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.
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.
By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.
> 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)
No firmware updates. no admin configuration. no ssh backdoors. just a transmit-only system
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.
It sounds like you think victims are necessarily blameless.
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.
What could possibly go wrong?
The grid could stabilize as a side effect. And the cars are already connected to the internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).
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 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.
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.
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)...
> 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.
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.
https://www.danfoss.com/en/industries/food-and-beverage/dcs/...
We fix it when it breaks. We replace it when even the aftermarket doesn't supply the parts to keep it working.
When you’re exposing a microcontroller to the internet that controls the conditions that physical inventory is held in, it’s probably best to make sure you’re getting security updates.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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”
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.
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.
Will they never learn?
* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.
Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.
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. :)
I doubt the fridge has a remote-controlled robot arm to unload itself.
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.
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"?
Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.
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.
Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.
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.
These are minimum wage workers - they don't have bean bags in the nap room, employee massages and stock options.
Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.
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.
Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.
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.
So we schedule service, and then we throw away all the food anyway because the problem cannot be addressed remotely.
The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
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
What use case does that need to be possible over the internet?
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.
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. :(
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
I'm in the beginning stages of giving my home HVAC system an upgrade and using Modbus throughout with various adapter boards.
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.
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...
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.