today at 8:15 PM
If you believe some of the emerging comments out there - try "Danfoss CVE" - you'll see that some of the suspects are 15-20 year old controllers like the Danfoss SM800 (EOS 2021) and SC355 (EOS 2016).
Why don't they just--- no margin. But there were CVEs-- no margin.
The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class has nothing in terms of luxuries like security reviews and gear replaced on cycles and other basics taken for granted.
But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
Secure-by-default laws will eventually help, but there's always going to be groaning infrastructure particularly in commodity industries, and we still haven't onboarded most of the disaffected men to the Internet that will commit innumerable more hacks and disruptions.
today at 8:29 PM
> The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class ...
I think it's more than this. Industrial control system upgrades are serious business and (at least if you're doing them properly) require a lot of planning and consideration. Particularly when the subsystem being replaced is decades old already.
I think the overwhelming majority of people (including on hn) have no understanding of how complex industrial systems are - even as-built, but particularly after decades of evolution. Doing proper engineering in these spaces is expensive.
You can reasonably blame supermarket chains for being insecure, but we certainly aren't currently enabling them (or anybody else) when it comes to fixing these issues.
today at 10:03 PM
Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
In before "but insurance"; yes insurance can in theory mitigate some of this, but I feel like people on HN have no understanding what it's like to deal with a multi-million dollar insurance claim that the insurance company 100% does not want to pay out. The legal battles over such things take years and are on their own incredibly expensive.
today at 10:11 PM
> Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
It happened once. Did you do the maths here? Can you tell us which one was Kore expensive and what percentage chance there was of this hack happening?
today at 10:28 PM
In my recent experience (last 3 months) with a cyber claim getting insurance to pay out was actually pretty straightforward. It was about a $250K USD loss on a phishing attempt (someone hijacked and rerouted payment details for a wire)
today at 10:10 PM
That class of risk was just theoretical for decades, so the price on it was basically 0.
Now that we see large scale incidents will there be an actual money value associated with upgrading systems and security for supermarket appliances.
today at 10:25 PM
I think it's fair that the price up until now has been mostly zero. On the other hand you can 10+ years of examples on HN of people saying these types of threats with IoT devices and internet connected industrial hardware are not theoretical and it's shocking they weren't being exploited more often.
today at 9:54 PM
I work in SCADA development, and believe me, there's a reason the industry moves slowly.
today at 10:31 PM
This comment could be a lot more interesting, useful and worth typing than it is. :(
today at 10:39 PM
Sorry, it was a busy day. I was agreeing with everyone else here. The move fast and break things attitude is one we can't afford when building control systems for critical infrastructure. I used to work in big tech, and if I pushed an update that didn't work or wasn't tested properly, the worst thing that could happen was we revert the change and there's a minor inconvenience to a user. If Facebook goes down for an hour, the company loses money, some advertisers get mad, and their users get frustrated. If an industrial Siemens SCADA operation goes down for an hour, the best case is the operation (be it a factory, airport, wastewater plant, etc.) shuts down for an hour. The worst case is people get sick or die.
It sounds dramatic but every update or change to the system rocks the boat and exposes it to a whole new tranche of dangers. So we spend most of our time observing. There's no such thing as a casual QoL update in SCADA.
today at 10:26 PM
Go on.
today at 10:24 PM
Yeah the margins are tiny because private equity has spent the better part of the century destroying American dynamism and outsourcing all externalities including getting hacked to the people.
today at 10:27 PM
This is only partly true, historically before private equity was a thing grocery was always a razor thin margin business that operated on volume. PE just made it worse.
today at 10:39 PM
My in-laws had a family grocery store back in the 60s and 70s. Privately owned and operated, no way they'd have been paying any attention to security concerns like this.
Their only chance would have been if appliance companies wouldn't be dumb enough to put a simple refrigerator on the public internet in the first place.
today at 9:14 PM
Doesn't sound all that convincing to me. There is no need for network controlled fridges in the first place. And it's not like setting up that network control was free. This is not about saving money, this is about ignoring what IT people preach since multiple decades now, spending more for the attack vector and then loosing a lot of money when that attack vector gets used. Margins? If it were about margins the problem wouldn't exist.
(I can see the need for remote monitoring, that the freezer actually worked. Controlling the temperature is the issue.)
today at 9:52 PM
today at 9:45 PM
So what you're telling us is that there is tremendous opportunity for a startup to disrupt the space with new Refrigeration-as-a-Service (RaaS) products controlled by AI. That way we can replace those legacy microcontrollers with modern, secure GPUs and vibe-coded AI agents.
today at 10:36 PM
I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in Canada, looking at grocery stores in isolation makes little sense when most of the market is controlled by a handful of vertically integrated conglomerates. On top of the stores, they own a lot of the distribution, wholesale operations, real estate, and even some suppliers. Their own financials show record revenue and profit, year after year, and their margins have increased significantly over the last few years too. We can't reduce the economics of such integrated corporate groups to their retail net margins alone to judge profitability. As far as Canada goes, small margins my ass.
today at 8:29 PM
Thank you for saying this. It's quite frustrating to read some comments here that have obviously lost touch with the reality of the vast majority of people and businesses across the world.
today at 10:03 PM
Iâd be willing to bet many more HN users work for companies who are the ones creating unnecessarily network connected smart devices than work in infrastructure, trades, retail-adjacent positions that implement/use many of these network connected devices.
Lots of completely out of touch comments
today at 9:54 PM
Target learned the security lesson the hard way, but they definitely learned it. When I was there, security was one of the rare parts of the tech org I found legitimately impressive. (But also: I am not a security guy! Maybe their actual practices were compelling but flawed! But the organization as a whole was legitimately serious about it )
today at 10:35 PM
Target learned the security lesson the hard way
About the 2013 Target data breach, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-...
today at 10:43 PM
Apparently Home Depot has a very good developer culture too.
today at 10:30 PM
Target is a far outlier in the insane shit that they do in terms of retail security. No one else really approaches them in this regard.
today at 8:46 PM
The margin is certainly blown, now
today at 9:16 PM
I can imagine that there's already an industrial security company at their door, offering a solution to prevent this from happening ever again, already tailored just for them.
Maybe it's even honestly not related to the attack.
today at 10:36 PM
The hardware vendor has long offered software updates. Unclear if the groceries were paying for support, they certainly weren't installing them.
Boeing still took the blame for MAX, when their customers didn't pay for training.
today at 9:40 PM
They probably have insurance for things like this. Speculation, but still. Lots of businesses mitigate risk by just buying insurance.
today at 9:57 PM
Insurance for cyber incidents usually only cover you if you took reasonable measures. Like not exposing your internal systems to the Internet.
today at 9:28 PM
It's not entirely clear which comments/criticisms you're responding to when pointing out the lack of margin. Whose excuse is that? And what's it an excuse for?
Security isn't optional just because margins are low. If eg FedEx decided to disregard security because they only made 3% of the value of the packages they ship in profit, they'd lose most of that business fast. But yes, let's not shame folks for failing to preempt theoretical-yet-unseen threats, if that's what you mean.
today at 9:38 PM
I think it's that people who've never faced a security threat and never had to think to are among the most vulnerable. And grocery stores are notoriously thin margin businesses who actually strive not to spend unnecessary the most.
At least that's what I got from it.
today at 10:11 PM
today at 9:30 PM
today at 8:43 PM
Framing IT vs OT differences as a class struggle?
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.
today at 8:58 PM
[flagged]
today at 10:29 PM
Of course not. It is precisely because they have to fight for scraps that this is the place where workers are beaten down the most, because the owners are making pretty damn sure they will be the ones to get that margin lining their pockets, everyone else be damned.
In high-margin industries, you can give a 3% salary increase and free coffee and snacks, it is a rounding error compared to the 20% yoy increase applied to your multi-billion dollar compensation.
today at 10:41 PM
> Of course not. It is precisely because they have to fight for scraps that this is the place where workers are beaten down the most, because the owners are making pretty damn sure they will be the ones to get that margin lining their pockets, everyone else be damned.
My class-brained friend, margin is what you get after wages, not before.
today at 10:37 PM
I was talking about the supposed oppression of customers through high prices, but itâs typical that communists imagine that the purpose of an enterprise, private or public is to provide jobs to union workers rather than to actually useful products or services to customers.
today at 10:01 PM
today at 9:30 PM
Was just talking to a lab tech at a hospital.
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.
today at 10:06 PM
Thereâs even more hospitals and clinics who have a radiology department but no Radiologist onsite to read the exams. Itâs all sent offsite to remote Radiologists sometimes 100+ miles away.
Disrupt the internet and good luck getting your emergent studies read by doctors who donât look at anything to do with the scans and X-rays they order other than the Radiologists report.
today at 9:36 PM
I can see how a subscription model would be appealing if it was in lieu of outright buying expensive equipment. Operating expenses for some machines are cheap but the machines are expensive enough that the tests themselves are expensive to pay off the machine.
Of course, the reality is more likely that the hospital still has to buy things and the subscription is a net loss on top of that so patients (or the people paying for the care) are screwed twice.
today at 9:53 PM
Or the equipment is otherwise expensive up-front to a small clinic. Ophthalmology, for example. The subscription feature is cheaper than becoming a financier.
today at 9:40 PM
It also creates a HARD dependency on internet access.
today at 1:02 PM
> Connecting your case controller to the internet offers further opportunities to generate savings. If you can diagnose issues and control the case remotely, service engineers neednât be called out to simple situations like starting a defrost. And being able to compare performance and efficiency across an entire estate of stores makes it easy to spot patterns and make incremental efficiency gains. (https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/articles/dcs/...)
I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".
today at 6:43 PM
People underestimate just how much effort goes into minimizing food waste and shortages in these types of industrial systems. The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
Connectivity in these environments is often challenging, it isn't like connecting a consumer fridge to wifi. Sometimes you are bridging weird networks that multiple parties need access to. It should be secure but that isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Many of these systems have very long lives, so there are many limitations that reflect the technology that existed when they were built.
All of this is invisible to the average person but it is what makes the world work.
today at 10:50 PM
It looks more like they set a target level for shortages and then try to minimize waste without exceeding that level. Almost every time I go to Safeway, they have run out of some items I intended to buy. Trader Joe's is more reliable, probably because they have fewer items in stock.
today at 6:52 PM
And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.
Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
today at 7:51 PM
Grocery stores infamously have some of the lowest margins in all of retail and typically hover in the 1-3% range. As a sector they have about zero room for inefficiency and have to be this aggressive about chasing operating cost reductions.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
today at 9:35 PM
Wonder the margins on those $9 boxes of Cheerios at major California grocers.
They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.
today at 10:33 PM
[dead]
today at 8:21 PM
Yeah, I worked at one during that time. The amount of food we threw away on a regular basis was incredible.
today at 7:11 PM
Except that in this case, the possibility of something like this probably is worth it, because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems, while ignoring the ability to improve system efficiency is a static stance. A lot of things have driven up the price of groceries since that time. You mention "comparable or lower inflation adjusted prices", but this hides the fact that the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation (105% vs a baseline of 94%), while the input costs to that supply chain (like labor, and diesel) have gone up faster. The efficiency isn't doing nothing, grocery prices would almost definitely be higher without it.
today at 7:31 PM
> because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems
If onlyâŠ
today at 7:42 PM
That's why I spoke of them in the plural. Obviously the possibility of a system hack (presumably) won't ever completely go away, but individual vulnerabilities as they appear in specific systems are usually tractable problems, especially if you narrow it to things that one wants solved rather than all possible vulnerabilities regardless of severity or accessibility.
today at 7:25 PM
> system vulnerabilities are solvable problems
Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.
today at 8:02 PM
That's not what "vulnerabilities are solvable problems" means, except maybe for cybersecurity maximalists who believe that, "bro, add passkeys, and just one more thing, attestation, and W^X, and ..., and there will never be vulnerabilities".
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
today at 7:21 PM
> the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
today at 9:06 PM
I think it's an interesting question.
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.
today at 7:59 PM
That's the work that goes into hiding the "other half" of the inflation (i.e. the 2x diff between reported inflation and what you can actually see in your life).
today at 6:57 PM
How would you stay in business if your competitor was offering 20% off your prices because they had better logistics and tracking? Ask consumers to eat the cost due to their latent demand for, uh, inefficient delivery and food spoilage?
today at 7:09 PM
Are you saying that stores in the 2000s were throwing away 20% more of their total revenue than they are today? That sounds crazy, especially given that the prices - again - seem pretty much the same or higher if you correct for inflation.
But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.
today at 9:48 PM
Coca cola is a bad example as it does not require refrigeration during transport and does not spoil fast (at all?).
today at 7:59 PM
Choose your own number, but it has to be large enough that supermarkets decided the CapEx was worth it, and also large enough that once one did it, the rest followed suit.
today at 8:47 PM
It's not even significant cost. The main cost is still the hardware, not electronics driving it, and especially not a tiny module that talks with electronics to send/receive commands/metrics
today at 7:02 PM
This is already the case in the grocery market. There are various leaner and more efficient operators offering the same goods for lower prices, sometimes a lot lower than just 20%. However most people don't think to shop at the various Grocery Outlet's or Food4Less's. Working class is wise to it but not really further up the class ladder. They don't think much at all and reflexively go to their ralphs, which plays the opposite game where they have higher prices such that they might occasionally mark them lower and make you think you are getting a deal. Some people are even going to erewhon.
today at 7:00 PM
There are numbers between 0.1% and 20%
today at 7:32 PM
No, this âuser storyâ does not mean the customer actually wants or uses the feature. You do not need remote command and control to tell if your truck chiller is working.
today at 7:42 PM
You don't need remote command and control to tell you if your single truck chiller is working, you can just go look at the thermostat. But a company needs it to confirm that the chillers are working and at a safe temperature across all 1,000 trucks in their fleet.
today at 9:57 PM
That's remote monitoring, though, not remote operation. Very different threat vector.
today at 7:57 PM
What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
today at 7:58 PM
But youâre going to adopt a platform that meets the needs across your enterprise, so the capability is often there even if one situation may only call for monitoring.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, âjust call someone to turn it up/down/offâ doesnât scale.
today at 8:39 PM
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, âjust call someone to turn it up/down/offâ doesnât scale.
And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.
today at 10:01 PM
And yet, progress marches forward and people want great efficiency and flexibility.
today at 8:00 PM
And you know what the customer needs? Or is this just a personal feeling. Thereâs multiple people from the industry chiming in on these threads as to why this is needed.
today at 4:12 PM
Thereâs a whole massive industry out there of companies looking to make 2% efficiency savings on everything, and VCs looking for this. The glossy presentation might have even said 2FA somewhere so yes itâs definitely safe.
The perspective of resiliency and how much will you lose if things go wrong seems kinda⊠new?
Funny that it should happen in France which has been at the forefront of European self resilience.
today at 1:12 PM
Good find.
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.
today at 1:43 PM
> 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?
today at 3:38 PM
I went through a manual you mentioned in another comment. It listed "High level of security against undesired user access" as one of the features but it wasn't expanded upon. So I did more searching and found cybersecurity best practices from Danfoss.
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.
today at 6:45 PM
I get that having networked devices is a very nice to have feature. However, putting them directly to the open internet is bewildering. Any person worth their salt in IT would know that's a bad idea. Were these people never brought into the conversation? Do they connect to the store's WiFi so that IT isn't actually needed to install once the WiFi creds are obtained?
today at 8:32 PM
I imagine a very conscientious vendor could easily set up a system that detects if the device is trivially exposed to the internet, causing warning messages and beeps and general pestering.
... And then the customer demands it be turned off, and the customer is always right...
today at 8:10 PM
IIoT (Industrial IoT) doesn't have time to deal with the load of bullcrap that cybersecurity is. Half of it is not even about security, but setting up moats and keeping control over users, which is very much not what you want to prioritize when setting up industrial infrastructure, and is rightfully rejected by engineers working there, who are concerned with safety and reliability first and foremost.
Though I'm afraid things are getting worse, or at least it looked so a few years ago, back when I worked in this space. The hot thing in IIoT / Industry 4.0 was basically taking all webshit technologies and deploying them on industrial hardware, to "leverage mature innovation and OSS ecosystem" or such nonsense. The problem (one of many) being, once the engineers were done trimming excessive security measures that negatively impacted safety, they were still left with node.js running on industrial controllers, now even less secure in general than it was originally.
today at 7:05 PM
Yes, there is little demand for this sort of thing when the potential loss, should it even come, is already insured. Your customer might actually not be users themselves but their insurance companies. It may be a better model to say pitch to them and then have them offer discounts to their clients who are using your tech that mitigates whatever % risk. Someone pitched that car probe to Progressive after all.
today at 9:24 PM
They're on Shodan and there's an admin account with a password that apparently *cannot* be changed.
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.
today at 1:17 PM
I would have said let them be doomed. But due to late stage capitalism so much has been centralized that everybody is doomed in many cases...
today at 5:40 PM
I look forward to the safe diversity provided by early stage socialism!
today at 1:21 PM
Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming out for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
today at 9:21 PM
Because in some ticket tracking system, some customer with the most tickets was nearly always calling for a tech to physically start a defrost. Maybe solving that accounts for 2% of support overhead. Itâs best to lose that customer. Second best is telling them defrost is remotely-triggered, and then not doing it. Third best is actually triggering it.
today at 1:09 PM
Thankfully these kind of attacks make pressure to finally have liability in software like in other industries.
today at 1:45 PM
The people who should be held liable never will be. Their money is like an impenetrable shield to any sort of accountability. They'll just scapegoat the guy that warned them about the risk repeatedly for not doing more to prevent it.
today at 1:50 PM
It has to start somewhere, even if imperfect.
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.
today at 9:59 PM
I wonder if, following the US army story in August, someone might have bet on a prediction market âDanfoss refrigeration systems will defrost after suffering an already-disclosed vulnerabilityâ.
today at 4:15 PM
Seems like two totally different issues. One is cost and one is efficiency gains.
For the latter I would imagine you could have a short (maybe a month) logging period where you connect the fridges and collect data and then comeup with some offline system to manage them generally for better efficiency. You could even have a test group or single fridge that you keep connected to the internet for future data points (like in case of a giant heatwave or something)
today at 1:05 PM
And I would bet dollars to donuts that someone at that company would respond "who's going to hack a refrigerator? Heh"
today at 6:47 PM
Send those asking that question the scene from Silicon Valley
today at 1:27 PM
We all keep a shotgun next to the printer in case it makes an unexpected noise here because the average HN reader knows a fridge manufacturer knows nothing about infosec and the lowest-bid contractor they farm the connection does the minimum to check the boxes. So yeah, we've been rightfully complaining about why does my icemaker need an internet connection for years.
Lets combine some testy topics: will LLMs make this any better? On the one hand, if it's easy for fridge manufacturers to churn out code, will the slop create enough cracks in the icemaker to sail the titanic through? Or will the lower barrier to pretty good security agents get more security into the IoT field (assuming it's taken advantage of?) Or will it not matter because the store manager will just set the web portal password to 123456?
today at 6:54 PM
That could be done by the servicemen or managers on-site. There is no reason at all to have remote control fridges. All this really does is make some higher up feel more importantl because they have a centralised controller, while providing very little real benefit.
Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.
today at 6:58 PM
The benefit is the same as making websites remote controllable. A person then doesn't have to drive in to flip a switch, which means fewer people are needed to operate more systems, saving the company money.
today at 8:46 PM
Switch to do what? If food is in it you can't change anything. If food isn't in it then why is it running or why wasn't it defrosted when it was emptied?
If you home refrigerator could be defrosted remotely, in what scenario would you ever do that?
today at 7:45 PM
Presumably the grocery stores are already staffed by at least one employee capable of flipping a switch, no?
today at 9:08 PM
Stores are now installing e-ink price tags to save labor updating price labels. They're not going to turn back from centralized HVAC/fridge monitoring and control.
today at 9:50 PM
Agreed, logging temperatures without the ability to actively control the fridge seems a much better approach.
today at 3:21 PM
This is pretty interesting as the Danfoss vulnerability was suspected to be related to a similar situation that occurred across US military bases in late August 2026.
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?
today at 4:23 PM
immediately thought of this article as well. really interesting. I could imagine someone using options/futures or other obscure financial instruments to make some money off this. hard to think of other motivations
today at 5:04 PM
I think Russia is doing random stuff of the kind, my understanding is itâs just about sawing general chaos, not doing a strong action that would be discussed at a diplomatic level.
today at 9:27 PM
Sowing*
Russia's idea of hybrid warfare means doing things like dragging anchors across internet cables and paying people to firebomb warehouses and businesses.
today at 7:43 PM
Really though? this feels cartoonishly evil, like the kind of thing a children's cartoon villain would do. It doesn't have any meaningful impact
today at 10:48 PM
This feels exactly what Russia has been doing for a couple of years. Not saying they did it this time, I have no idea. But it would be very much in character.
today at 9:52 PM
It creates confusion, lowers trust in companies and government to control/keep the country working, just more shit flooding in the zone.
today at 4:56 PM
Perhaps theyâre motivated by Europeâs support for Ukraine and the recent data center attacks in Russia?
today at 7:46 PM
So they mess with 5% of one chain's freezers? idk maybe i'm being naive seems so silly
today at 9:28 PM
Part of this story is also attacks on digital price tags on the shelves. Protests in France come to mind.
today at 6:07 PM
Building reps for hacking all the electric cars and starting battery fires
today at 7:12 PM
Not sure if it's related but there was a vuln published in August for the freezers in the article
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
maybe groups have been looking for targets to use it on?
today at 7:15 PM
I worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.
These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage. One example might be that due to shifting customer patterns and products, you might want a certain refrigerator case to be kept colder with a narrower temperature range. Another example is for Demand Response: when a brownout may occur, the utility companies want people to lower their load, which, in the case of supermarkets, means turning off lights, increasing the thermostat on the AC, turning off dehumidifiers, etc.
One notable story from that time: this was during the 2008 economic crash, and the company went from hiring to laying off within a week. A group of technicians were working on a refrigerator compressor system and were told by security to stop what they were doing and immediately exit the building. They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
today at 7:40 PM
There's huge difference between _sensors_ and _actuators_. You can put sensors online if you don't care too much about data leaking out. You put _actuators_ online... You need to be able to deal with the consequences.
today at 8:18 PM
How does this actually work, in practice? If you have read access to sensors, then there's a non-air-gapped network between the control systems and the internet.
If your network isn't air gapped, then it's vulnerable, and attackers will side step the "read only" path to affect control system changes.
today at 8:54 PM
It's being called a data diode (diodes usually allows current in one direction only).
It can be implemented with a fiber optics cable with only the transmitter on the secure side, a laser+photo cell for real air gap, cutting the rx cable in a rs232 or having a microcontroller with an output pin connected to another controllers input pin. By handling it with hardware instead of software you get a very secure partition between the trusted and untrusted side.
It's used to monitor for example industrial systems and power plants.
Wikipedia calls it unidirectional network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
today at 9:03 PM
Yes, this is exactly the kind of approach I'm referring to when I say it's possible (though not trivial to implement), but it still doesn't prevent attacks. Air France 447 crashed with extraordinary loss of life because the pilots responded incorrectly to reported sensor readings. Any scenario where authorised staff are able to affect changes in a control system is vulnerable. The attack vectors just change to suit the target system.
today at 9:16 PM
AF447 wasn't a security breach. You're talking about an entire separate class of human-machine interaction problem that has little relevance to the lack of security around access to OT operational surfaces.
today at 9:42 PM
All fancier than a camera pointed at the thermostat readout Iâm sure but is the laser & photocell anywhere close to similar in concept?
today at 8:29 PM
System a emits telemetry. System b reads telemetry and exposes to the internet.
You can't drive my car simply by pointing a webcam on the steering wheel.
today at 8:36 PM
Sure, but think through the details. There are ways to expose telemetry through an otherwise air gapped system, but it is actually not easy to implement correctly.
My position is that if there's any connection, of any practical type, between the control system and the outside world, an attacker will be able to find ways to break things.
Even if it just boils down to "an attacker made our dashboards report numbers wrong and so we closed a valve to prevent an issue that didn't exist, and inadvertently destroyed our own product", the outcome is the same.
today at 8:48 PM
âhackers generated fake alertsâ â harder than it sounds.
today at 8:41 PM
today at 8:45 PM
Difference between a smart thermostat for your ac and an Arduino temperature sensor next to your AC thermostat?
today at 8:41 PM
There're different devices. You put online some but not the others.
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.
today at 8:46 PM
Sure, but as stated in reply to a sibling comment, you then just hack the read-only system to mis-report sensor state and interfere with operations that way instead. Or use one of a million other approaches. Attacks won't follow your rules.
today at 8:57 PM
I think this comes down to the implementation of a particular system. But in general, since control system (the one that controls things through actuators) is NOT online, one can't interfere with it through online channels. They can interfere with sensors and fake readings reported online for example, probably, but not the ones used by the control system as it's offline.
today at 9:10 PM
Indeed, I agree that it's better to have the control systems separate from the telemetry systems and that absolutely does prevent certain types of attack. It's dangerous to think that prevents all types of attack, however.
today at 8:18 PM
Exactly, this is bad security plain and simple
today at 8:07 PM
This is the way. Read only remote, write access requires on site access.
today at 8:35 PM
Pretty much.
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.
today at 7:44 PM
Managers can just call the store on-site employees. Or come in person. They just want to save on labor (aka replace humans with robots).
today at 7:58 PM
Supermarkets very efficiently drive down the cost of food so that food is abundant - basically everyone in developed counties has access to low cost food. Part of that process is not wasting overhead on having people manually checking various gauges.
Itâs a very low margin business if you donât work efficiently youâll get outcompeted by people who do like Aldi/ Trader Joeâs etc
today at 9:01 PM
Comparing Control automation of boring systems running all the time to robots is really funny to me. Those systems weren't previously run by humans before the more electronic approach, the control mechanism was physical in nature but less adjustable.
Most of the HVAC based control system changes are about saving energy, not labor.
today at 10:37 PM
Grocery is very low-margin, and if a new system can save $500 on electricity and maintenance per year per store, and you've got 1000 stores, the technology justifies its cost very quickly.
today at 10:33 PM
Saving on labor is the purpose of most technologies since the pointy stick.
today at 8:42 PM
Those are good reasons to have the machines network connected. They are not good reasons to have the machine internet connected.
today at 7:50 PM
Why not put them behind a VPN
today at 7:57 PM
Often attacks like this involve first getting on the VPN (leaked creds, a n-day on a web-accessible endpoint, etc) then running wild on the internal services that everyone assumes are safe.
today at 8:40 PM
"I won't lock the door coz attackers might be able to bring battering ram"
today at 9:38 PM
you can just walk into any store, find ANY PC and stick your USB drive into it.
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
today at 7:58 PM
> They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
today at 8:18 PM
Of course not. The security team was likely blamed, or the techs doing the test. All of the grunt labor should be ready for stupid management decisions on a moments notice and plan accordingly.
today at 7:48 PM
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because [reasons]
I understand why it's beneficial to have these systems connected to a network. You have not explained why that network has to be the Internet, and TFA is one reason why it shouldn't be.
today at 10:34 PM
Well, many of them were still on dial-up modems in 2008.
today at 8:40 PM
[dead]
today at 7:38 PM
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.
today at 7:54 PM
Also unless managers in grocery store chains means something else than in any other corporation, I somehow doubt it's managers who monitor or "take action" on remotely-controlled fridges.
today at 6:25 PM
Confusing title, both the original and the one here on HN.
Three french supermarket chains had their refrigeration systems hacked.
Separately, a super market chain serving Belgium and the Netherlands shut down a large chunk of their IT systems due to a "cybersecurity incident", primarily affecting distribution centers and grocery delivery services. But the supermarkets are currently open, and do not have refrigeration issues.
Suspicious timing and these incident could well be related, but that has not been reported so far.
It could well be one ransomware attack on Ahold Delhaize, and an unrelated attack on a refrigeration supplier. Note that a similar refrigeration attack happened happened to a number of US military installations a few weeks ago.
today at 9:06 PM
today at 3:11 PM
Looks like that specific vulnerability was found this summer, disclosed in coordination with the vendor and at least some models were patched [0] (unclear if all models were), but from early reports:
- they either didn't warn their customers this was a critical security patch, - many of these fridges/freezers were directly accessible on the internet with their own 3G/4F SIM cards without further protection!
Crazy stuff
[0] https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
today at 4:30 PM
That is a shocking read! check_code_of_day WTAF! How did Danfoss not go around to all customers and hand-install a patch for this.
today at 4:35 PM
Do you know how much that costs?!? What about our executive bonuses?
today at 3:11 PM
Freeze the Controller, Defrost the Food: Uncovering Vulnerabilities in Danfoss Refrigeration Controllers Amir Zaltzman / August 9th, 2026
https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
today at 6:18 PM
We all know the saying: The S in IoT stands for secure.
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around âŹ7,000 [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 doesnât use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
[1] https://www.lefroid.fr/fr/c/p/402785
today at 7:59 PM
>The product label also says "Made in Denmark.
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.
today at 6:55 PM
I promise I'm not simping for Danfoss, just because I'm danish, but... Is it really their fault the customers aren't putting these things behind VPN? Yes, the thing should be secure ideally, but why take the risk?
today at 8:15 PM
Agreed, it's not necessarily Danfoss's fault. The customer bought the appliance and is free to do whatever they want with it, that's what ownership is about and I fully support this. But in a situation like this, who bears responsibility? The customer whose appliance is exposed to the internet, likely having been installed by an authorized technician in the first place, or Danfoss, whose now-insecure maintenance interface listens on 0.0.0.0? I don't have an answer.
As others have pointed out, this interface is intended for use by service personnel.
My point is simply that situations like this can be prevented in several ways: on the customers side, if they have a capable IT department, or on the vendors side, by designing with the expectation that some customers will inevitably expose devices to the internet, regardless of what the manuals and training materials say.
today at 4:08 PM
This is a great find, would be nice for it to be mentioned in the original article. It all worked out just like the title says. I guess someone didn't upgrade their firmware in time.
today at 6:55 PM
The security advisory linked in that article was published in August 2025. Apparently it took about a year to finish the writeup. Unless the supermarket also spent about a year without upgrading the firmware, it might be a newer vulnerability.
today at 7:50 PM
Thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't noticed that. I'd expect a large customer to be persuaded by Danfoss to upgrade within a year, especially before publishing the details of the vulnerability, so you're probably right.
today at 5:36 PM
Interestingly, a major Dutch supermarket was also hit by a yet-undescribed cyberattack, prompting them to basically shut down every IT system. So not a hack of a control system, sounds more like an ordinary ransomware attack... but still tantalizing that two EU countries have their food supplies targeted the same day... the day of a big NATO "russia we dont mess around" conference, too.
today at 6:40 PM
Meanwhile Samsung doesn't even need hackers - a firmware update on consumer devices is enough: https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/samsungs-disa...
today at 6:58 PM
[dead]
today at 3:39 PM
>Carrefour (CARR.PA), opens new tab said 80 of its supermarkets had been hit but that the vast majority of its 6,000 stores had not been affected.
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.
today at 7:06 PM
This article theorizing US Army freezers were hacked to defrost, from late August this year - only about six weeks ago! - is prescient. It was posted here on HN.
https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...
today at 7:11 PM
Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
today at 8:40 PM
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
today at 10:08 PM
Depressing to know that these CVEs were known since August.. and not one manufacturer forced an update to their always online devices.. and the regular customer will foot the bill for the incompetency.
today at 10:19 PM
Well as usual if you want to see the stupid count, just query in Shodan this and behold just how many are left exposed for this same incident again:
http.html:"StoreView" https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http.html%3A%22StoreView%...
Total Results: 4,525
today at 7:00 PM
> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.
I feel like this is kind of holding the supermarket hostage and saying, âSure your freezer is working fine, but if you refuse to buy new freezers from us prepare to get hacked.â
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 didnât in order to force sales of newer models.
today at 9:46 PM
If thatâs the case, then supermarkets (who are not in the cybersecurity business) should feel good about filing a claim with their insurance. The insurance company can decide whether the freezer maker owes existence-risking damages.
today at 7:22 PM
Aug 28, 2026 https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack... I Think The Military Commissaryâs Freezers Were Hacked
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
today at 9:42 PM
TIL what âdata diodesâ are after discussing this incident with a friend and quickly brainstorming a cheap way of airgapping a system with unidirectional comms. We figured two arduinos and optocouplers should do it, turns out if you productize this and get everything certified you can charge up to 20k for it. Crazy!
today at 1:15 PM
My first idea was "who the hell needs connected fridges".
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.
today at 1:41 PM
Internet connected fridges are not new.
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 usersâ 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...
today at 1:30 PM
Or keep duty-cycling the units until the pumps burn out...
today at 2:11 PM
my water kettle has wifi support for some weird reason.
today at 1:29 PM
who the hell needs connected AC and floor heating?
today at 2:37 PM
I moved to a new apartment with all this stuff installed.
At first I thought exactly that - just why.
When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.
When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.
So all in all - really not needed.
today at 7:06 PM
My connected thermostat used the weather to determine expected outdoor temperature and sun exposure to adjust timing of heating and cooling as well as presence or absence of cell phone âat homeâ to adjust temperature range for savings. It also used cell phone approaching home to go back to normal temperature ranges.
today at 7:16 PM
My dumb thermostat also accounts for outdoor weather and sun exposure, simply by directly measuring the indoor air temperature which changes in response to those things. Dumb ones can also have schedule programming too. There's been plenty of times running errands when I approach home and then pass it up. Usually better to keep your temp constant than go through heating/cooling/big delta cycles generally speaking anyhow. One of those things where it feels like it makes sense but probably doesn't if you are coming back that day anyhow.
today at 7:30 PM
Connected A/C has been useful for me, because I also have a window fan and outdoor temperature sensors. So when target temp is below indoor temp but above outdoor temp, I turn off the A/C and turn on the venting fan. It's a lot more energy efficient.
Now, is it connected to the internet? Ha ha ha, no.
today at 5:21 PM
So tossing out an idea:
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.
today at 5:24 PM
You suggest that supermarket fridges should not be connected to network?
today at 10:39 PM
If my internet connected fridge can't talk to the supermarket's internet connected fridge, how will they figure out when I need more milk?
today at 7:04 PM
Not any of the controls. At best they should simply report temps and operational status.
today at 6:01 PM
I think he suggests that manufacturers should be responsible for keeping their products reasonably secure.
today at 7:37 PM
Doesn't look like this needed a rampant AI, pardon, elite superintelligence:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079
today at 5:55 PM
These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
I remember working on my car when I lived in an apartment. I'd take my tools out into the parking lot, and get to work. If I needed to use the potty, or get a snack, or whatever, I had to pack up the tools and take them inside. Then out again. It really stinks.
I currently live in a high trust neighborhood where I don't need to be present with anything outside.
It's so much better.
today at 10:49 PM
The internet is global. These hackers could very well be government / military backed or bordering on terrorism. It's a lot more serious than petty vandalism and won't be solved by finger wagging about youths these days.
Companies and governments need to start taking security extremely seriously. Exposing insecure junk to the internet is a massive risk.
today at 6:02 PM
Digital hackers who cause real world harm effects should get treated like the terrorists they are with all that means in terms of the available inerdictions.
today at 6:14 PM
They should be treated as pirates (law of the sea). I think terrorist are charged under piracy laws.
today at 7:00 PM
Nah, im glad hackers are exposing vulnerabilities in critical infastructure and logistics. Otherwise when some belligerent oligarch or politician or generally wealthy asshole decides they should rule everything they don't have easy avenues to fuck things up.
today at 7:47 PM
Vulnerabilities can be exposed by reporting them to the vendor.
today at 8:43 PM
Which will then be ignored because it costs money to fix if there are no consequences to not fix it.
today at 8:56 PM
Do assert that vandals are doing a public service?
today at 8:24 PM
> These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
Um, if everyone needlesly suffered, we'd not have the problem.
Whereas we have in fact generously provided life-enrichment opportunities - to miscreants.
today at 7:19 PM
[flagged]
today at 12:34 PM
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But thereâs going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
today at 1:44 PM
No. Politicians will do no such thing. There have been hacks/attacks of internet-connected appliances for more than a decade. LG is notorious for demanding that appliances be connected (why does a washing machine do when connected to the internet?).
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
today at 4:52 PM
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time
They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.
For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.
today at 12:41 PM
And hopefully regulation following it.
today at 1:15 PM
What regulations would help with this? companies that actually host the models themselves can be regulated but open models can e abliterated or otherwise modified to stop them from refusing tasks. I'd be very wary of any regulations that prevent people from hosting or making their own models and weights.
today at 5:53 PM
In the U.S. the following brands are affected (systems were proactively taken offline):
* Food Lion, 1100 stores
* Stop & Shop, 400 stores
* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores
* Hannaford, ~160 stores
Websites are down at the very least. May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery. Mobile apps are down. âIn-app couponâ redemption is likely down.
US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.
today at 7:41 PM
1 data point of Yep. I went to my local Monoprix to grab a few things during lunch break. For some reason they seemed to have suffered a fridge incident, good for me I didn't need anything from those aisles. I did wonder if it was just a recent problem or if a more sneaky malfunction had silently semi-spoiled some of the products I brought back days before, until it just blew over.
today at 7:57 PM
today at 6:15 PM
Something different came to mind as I read this article - there has been recent chatter regarding impending Food security issues - it was even talked about by India's foreign minister recently:
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.
today at 4:02 PM
Same (an outage) happened to the US military commissary system https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-09-01/army-cid-inve...
today at 5:11 PM
I was hoping there would be more discussion about the overlap of these two events.
today at 5:17 PM
The overlap between those two events is that digital security sucks ass and that attacks are much easier to mount in an era of agents.
today at 5:19 PM
I can see advantages to collating data for both organizations, but to it just raises the question, once again, of why simple appliances are connected to the Internet.
today at 5:26 PM
today at 5:38 PM
That, and why there's not a company VPN in between.
today at 6:18 PM
These industrial networks are often not internal to a single company, sometimes by necessity. They also are often installed in places with inherent connectivity difficulties, so sometimes you are bridging weird networks that limit what is possible just to get the signal out.
These aren't consumer fridges with wifi. The situation on the ground is significantly more complex. There are a lot of embedded sensors and control systems in supply chains in order to minimize waste.
today at 5:41 PM
Because a main user of this is the third-party HVAC contractor, and there's a operational cost to getting him set up on the grocer's VPN. (He has thousands of clients, that's in aggregate a lot of customers that would need to give him VPN access. He will do whatever the client asks of him, but he will bill accordingly.)
today at 5:37 PM
1. There's nothing simple about a commercial HVAC install, especially across a national chain.
2. Because they think (rightly or wrongly) that the benefits of monitoring and ease of maintenance and their contractor having direct access to the data outweigh the risks.
3. They think it outweighs the risk because IOT has been socially normalized, creating the wide perception that no, it's not that bad.
They almost certainly have insurance for this kind of event, and their insurer will almost certainly think real hard about the pros/cons of this, and will adjust rates accordingly. The grocer is free to take those rates into account when deciding on whether their next store will have an IOT HVAC.
today at 7:06 PM
I came here for this very discussion. Shame more investigation was not done on this story.
today at 6:54 PM
Watch Dogs was ahead of its time. How long before one of these hacker groups claim the DedSec name as their own?
today at 6:59 PM
So, those fridges are in the supermarkets, right? Where people work, who have to empty a fridge before it can be remotely defrosted. Why can't those people just press a defrost button? What is the point of doing defrosting remotely when you cannot do it without the onsite support?
today at 7:22 PM
>Where people work, who have to empty a fridge before it can be remotely defrosted.
You don't empty a fridge with built-in defrost. Your home fridge defrosts itself every 12-24 hours and you don't have to do anything.
Normally, the temperature recovers in ~1 hour after a defrost. The attack is apparently chaining manual defrost commands one after another so that the interior gets way too hot.
today at 7:04 PM
Could it be that it defrosts only by raising the temperature for a few hours just a bit to get the same effect and they food stays there?
today at 7:18 PM
That's way the non-smart walk-in coolers work; every 12 hours they turn off the fans and heat the cooling element for about 15 minutes to melt any ice that's built up on it.
Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.
today at 5:45 PM
On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.
today at 4:22 PM
Claude had munchies....
today at 5:15 PM
"claude, make better use of eletricity costs. stop services not required for the task. make no mistakes"
today at 7:15 PM
hacked or backdoored? [1]
> The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered âin certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS,â referring to battery management systems.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-warns-hidden-rad...
today at 8:30 PM
There was an article recently about a similar hack on fridges in American military bases I believe.
today at 6:31 PM
Supermarkets in the Netherlands were also hit. Seems like a Russian linked attack.
today at 1:25 PM
> cyberattack, which has hit Danfoss-made refrigeration controls
Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now.
The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.
today at 6:37 PM
These are fridges in supermarkets, not home fridges. I think a supermarket capable of administering many fridges can put their big boy pants on and handle the potential downsides of controllability.
today at 9:35 PM
how is it possible that fridges are exposed bare bones to Internet?
why not put them behind corporate VPN of some kind?
today at 8:45 PM
Is this the same thing that hit the military bases in the US?
today at 6:39 PM
Just when you think the golden age of hackers is over... Wasted food is bad, of course, but this is the kind of genius that military academies can never teach.
today at 7:21 PM
What a golden goose for hackers to have potentially every single facet of life, however large or small, network accessible.
today at 6:45 PM
Second order thought, this is going to create a nightmare of new AI regulations and if your company has European customers, prepare yourself.
today at 5:17 PM
The same happened to a major Dutch supermarket chain.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
today at 4:43 PM
I think it's important to see if this could happen on a larger scale. What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints of food worldwide? What would happen to food prices?
today at 5:14 PM
>What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints
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...
today at 4:52 PM
There is probably enough variety in refrigeration technology that this scenario is unrealistic. There are many tens to hundreds of manufacturers worldwide.
today at 5:10 PM
Similar issue affected a US military base very recently. Multiple manufacturers doesn't help if they source the same components.
today at 5:13 PM
By the way, Soviet refrigerators are immune to this type of attacks.
today at 5:27 PM
because they are empty?
today at 5:32 PM
Obviously, because they cannot be controlled over Internet. Also, some consumer Soviet refrigerators are still operating, they were made pretty reliable because one could not easily replace one.
today at 4:19 PM
People never learn:
https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...
today at 7:48 PM
Or, as one old and wise sysadmin would often say in the early days of the Internets, "the only 100% reliable firewall is a pair of scissors"
today at 7:36 PM
It's super bad when even Appie is not safe from those Russians, etc.
today at 4:36 PM
Maybe the agent swarm passed its âwarmthâ eval.
today at 6:12 PM
It really, really irks me that in one of the articles about this, it mentions the manufacturer pointing to "outdated firmware", and even comments here demeaning the store for not "securing" their __refrigerators__. Read that twice, and think how many times this silliness could apply to far too many objects in our lives.
Very few things should be networked, or at the very least, not with any sort of control. I can't even blame the average person anymore for not being as aware about technology, unless there's some sort of aggression or dismissive responses when they're informed of the risks or potential risks. Software developers at this point may very well end up being as despised as lawyers or bankers, for not broadly enough condemning this sort of technological creep, but for being that guy smugly saying something about firmware updates ... on a refrigerator.
today at 12:31 PM
âGot another blackout in Santo Domingo. Netrunners are at it again, poking holes in the power grid!â
today at 12:37 PM
that's happened in Ukraine, a few times already â search for sandworm
andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...
today at 7:44 PM
âŠand thatâs a good thing, as this non critical incident will raise awareness for safety in more critical domains like power plants, medical devices⊠oh who am I kidding.
Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.
today at 12:31 PM
Fridge attack! We live sci-fi indeed! %-)
today at 5:21 PM
Maybe, just maybe, fridges shouldn't be online. Cue immediate responses of: but don't you understand, management can now monitor it 24/7 and adjust in real time. To which I have about the same response:
Maybe they shouldn't.
today at 5:29 PM
I would maybe tone that down that sentiment a bit and limit the adjustement.
You actually do want to be able to monitor them remotely, like most industrial/commercial refrigeration, to detect failures faster and more reliably. They should still be at least secured with normal auth/autz in addition to perimeter security, though.
If I can know when a fridge failed within the hour (even at night) then I can also dispatch a technician same/next day more easily.
today at 5:57 PM
If what's needed is the ability to monitor them, then why are these things remote-controllable?!
Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.
today at 6:13 PM
Same reason website's are remote controllable. There's someone who's job it is, is to make sure the fridge is up and running, 24/7 and for the same reason that website operators/SREs don't live at each POP/DC, that fridge operator wants to remotely be able to flip some relays off and on to fix the problem without having to drive onsite, if possible. Additional, a single person/fewer people can then also be responsible for multiple/more sites.
today at 6:11 PM
Thatâs exactly right. There all all sorts of read-only architectures where the device can be monitored without every directly accessing it:
- The deviceâs control has a radio transmitter that emits its readings, but no receiver. Listen for those messages to monitor it but thereâs not a physical path to reply to it.
- The deviceâs 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 doesnât have a method to receive replies. You just have to commit to using any one of those thousands of mechanisms.
today at 7:11 PM
The fridges are cheaper to make because they don't need a bunch of knobs and switches and temperature displays - just an app on employee phones.
today at 8:38 PM
How is a button more expensive than a computer with network access?
today at 8:48 PM
because you might not want to send a technician to every single one of them once a firmware update is needed
today at 6:07 PM
Read-only access is mostly an illusion that itself can be hacked to gain control.
today at 6:31 PM
I have a read only temperature sensor in my old-school non-computerized refrigerator and freezer. Hack until the cows come home but it still can't turn off my freezer.
today at 7:23 PM
Off topic but "hack until the cows come home" put a smile on my face.
today at 7:31 PM
Air-gapping, network segregation, data diodes, etc. are all real things. It's possible to make a read-only refrigerator that is "unhackable". I have a temperature monitor in my refrigerator right now. Hack that monitor and it doesn't affect my refrigerator at all.
today at 7:34 PM
today at 7:39 PM
not in this case where a thermosensor can do nothing but monitor a temperature.
today at 6:13 PM
Yeah? We had an old Unix server that printed its logs in realtime to a dot matrix printer. How are you going to gain control of that?
Read-only is a strong control with lots of solid implementations.
today at 6:31 PM
Depending on the make and model, send a reverse feed code and then overwrite with block characters. You will know that something bad happened, but you won't know what.
today at 5:34 PM
There is value in nuance and debating whether the solution should be scaled down to say a store ( or only available on local vlan or something), but I think the value of discussing that is kinda diminishing, when, apparently, the controls for all stores can be done from the same hit.
But to address your specific point:
being able to monitor does not ( or at least should not ) automatically equal put it on the web
today at 6:21 PM
There are most likely IT governance problems: builders bought fridges, IT didn't provision sufficient access, installers put 3G keys instead of spending time getting the correct VPN/networking, and a few months later no one knows how this thing works, and IT is not mandated to find out that shops ever did that.
today at 5:52 PM
This still shouldn't be online. They can be networked, if you need remote monitoring, but that's different from being online (at least in my definition).
Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.
today at 6:24 PM
> This still shouldn't be online.
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.
today at 6:49 PM
So this is how it was done 25 years ago: Only the used ports (ethernet jacks) on a network is activate, disconnecting a device and the port closes. That strictly speaking doesn't mean that there aren't way to get devices on the network, but it does make it a lot harder. You're absolutely correct about these networks being in hostile environments, but why then do we pretend that they are not? Fridges like these have never not been in a hostile environment, so why aren't basic security measures taken to secure the physical side of things?
In my world the central server can be hack in two ways, that is by a malicious operator or via some scheme like the US/Israeli attack on Irans uranium centrifuges. The central server also have no business being online, that to is on a closed network, running the whitelisted applications from the manufacturer.
today at 7:33 PM
This is how it was done in this [0] very nice 60 years old (I'm sad now) movie. [Spoiler alert] An alarm is triggered so many times the guards just disable it. Alert fatigue has worked the same forever. Nobody wants to check the thousands of false alarms that probably happen every day across thousands of locations.
As long a schedule is conceived in one place and applied in another, even with human intervention on both sides, either one of the sides can be swindled. At this point with the bar for a successful hack being lower than ever, completely removing the hardware necessary to make remote changes is probably the only way to limit the blast radius.
Maybe allowing to send the schedule but requiring a local employee to operate a local hardware only control to apply it could work, but who has the money for this kind of complexity. Something like this on every freezer (device, really) in a fleet probably costs multiples of the money they lost with the spoiled food.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522
today at 7:38 PM
this definitely does not require a fridge be "online" and have the ability to be remotely programmed. At the very least have the monitoring and potentially I/O capabilities in a different device that can easily be removed from the system. Integrated smart fridges deserve to Suck it, Jin-yang!
today at 6:47 PM
To be clear, they didn't monitor it 24/7, otherwise they would have noticed the fridges were grilling the pizzas.
today at 5:43 PM
Like the other poster mentioned, blanket statements like this ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
I have a smart fridge and washer. I won't name names. But for several years they were never connected or online at all (unless they was compromised and I didn't know). I connected them and one of the first updates included in the washer was changing the default wash cycle from something like 110 minutes to 46 or something. I don't remember all the values if I'm honest.
There are executives who have spreadsheets and charts of how much water that saved per household over varying periods of time. How much it would save with greater adoption. And the unsaid message, or maybe they'll be explicit, of how many people are going to face tragic water supply issues in the future.
It's a powerful message, even if we know it's cyncical and calculated to push not just washers, but firmware security systems and institutions to govern those systems.
And yes, compromised systems can also be used to build zombie networks to push horrible content.
I feel horrible that this critically important surface issue of water supply is used to push other agendas. I honestly wish I could do other work not related to it.
today at 5:52 PM
<< ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.
More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:
I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.
In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.
today at 7:34 PM
>Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control.
Which is how they got into this situation. These are industrial refrigeration systems subject to a huge list of variables (how many units, their sizes, and doors hooked up to a refrigeration circuit, open vs closed cases, ambient conditions, hours of store operation, what type of refrigerant, whether heat is going to a cooling tower or air heat exchanger). They use a ton of energy, and percent optimization leads to millions of dollars over a fleet. They are designed to let the user dial in every operating parameter, like defrost.
Compare this to my home fridge where all these parameters are fixed in the firmware because the hardware is 100% identical.
Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
today at 8:35 PM
<<Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
Honestly, reality begs to differ.
today at 5:55 PM
Agree. I don't want fridge company or anyone else to turn my fridge into residential proxy with its access sold to the highest bidder to build web scrapers.
today at 5:32 PM
Monitoring would be one thing, but there's almost no conceivable reason to allow setting the temperature or triggering a defrost cycle remotely. When was the last time you changed the temperature setting on your fridge or freezer? It's something you set once when you install it and then never touch again.
This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.
today at 5:46 PM
> 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.
today at 5:50 PM
Yes, I have similar strategy. But in all cases I'd prefer to just buy analog appliances. There's no good reason to put a digital computer in a refrigerator. A bimetallic thermostat does the job just fine.
today at 6:11 PM
> When was the last time you changed the temperature setting on your fridge or freezer?
Then again when was the last time you opened your freezer hundreds of times during one day, letting humid air in and building ice at an accelerated rate? These units actively heat up the back of the freezer (evaporator plate) nightly to quickly melt the ice without warming up the food.
There is no reason to directly trigger it remotely but they probably work on a customizable schedule, to account for different store opening times, timezones, or freezer size and model. The hackers could target that schedule to make the defrost last longer.
today at 7:30 PM
You're right, a commercial freezer is a different beast than a household one. But what good does it really do anyone to be able to adjust that defrost schedule remotely? Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
Within a store certain freezers get more traffic than others, depending on how they're stocked, where they're located, etc, and therefore likely require more frequent defrosting. But that's something the store managers can figure out. It doesn't need to be managed remotely by some third party. So why did someone engineer that capability?
More features, generally, means more failure modes. More ways to exploit the system. Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion. It's very unhealthy and disordered behavior from an engineering standpoint--sacrificing reliability and simplicity for... what exactly? Some centralized control capability? But why?
today at 8:01 PM
To be clear I don't think the defrost schedule is the way the hackers enabled this or else every device would be affected. The older devices probably connect to the SaaS server in an insecure way and could be exploited en-masse.
> Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
The purpose of the automation is the same as always, to run at peak effectiveness and reduce human error. Most of the workers in this industry much like the fast food one, are low paid, low skill, receiving only basic training, with a high turnover rate, across tens of thousands of locations from major cities to somewhere in the sticks. Even a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage that's only obvious too late. So this extra work is taken out of their hands. You should really see a lot of the machines the big fast food chains use, you'd be amazed.
This kind of decision was never left to the store manager. In the past they'd get a printout and probably fail to follow the instructions occasionally, which may or may not cause damage or increases operating costs across the entire fleet. Now it's done over the network like everything else, for better or worse.
> Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion.
> More features, generally, means more failure modes.
Here's the kicker, they are necessary and desired by the customer and the failure scenarios were almost definitely factored into their calculations. I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
And normally I'd agree (more) with you but the small scale of the hack makes me think they've done a decent job at securing them so far. Spending more on people and security to avoid any hack (right?), or losing efficiency over tens of thousands of locations costs more than the spoiled food.
today at 8:50 PM
I'd be fascinated to know how much impact on TCO remote control actually has. There's definitely an economy of scale argument, if you can make tens of thousands of devices a couple percent more efficient that has a real impact, but does the remote control capability actually move the needle that much?
There isn't a complex real time control scenario here.. Obviously defrosting too much wastes energy, so you'll want to get that one right. But does having centralized control over that really make a difference at scale? Does having centralized control over temperature set-point make any difference?
From the basic physics of the process it's hard to imagine real time remote control being a decisive factor in efficiency.
> I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
I mean.. maybe? But nothing you wrote actually demonstrates that.
[edit] I guess if it's not about efficiency but instead a trust issue then it makes more sense from a marketing standpoint. But generally remote control isn't a great way to work around untrusted operators with physical access. They could just prop a door open or slice the seal if they wanted to..
today at 7:41 PM
> something the store managers can figure out
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.
today at 8:20 PM
You're confusing specialized refrigeration maintenance (which, at least in the US requires EPA certification) with general end user operations tasks. It is the store manager's job to know how to operate, optimize, and take basic care of their equipment. Just like it's an excavator operator's job to know how to check the fluids and grease the machine. They don't need to rebuild the engine or do specialized maintenance like lineboring, but they are responsible for basic care of the machinery.
today at 6:23 PM
basically SCADA but I bet no one remembers that now.
today at 5:31 PM
Monitor yes
Adjust: possibly, withing a range
Shutting down: Big no no
today at 5:33 PM
well they weren't shut down. just adjusted. and the adjustment range apparently went up all the way to +50 centigrade...
today at 6:19 PM
It's not a maybe. They simply shouldn't. The level of idiocy of not only management but also those who implemented the "security" protecting those online fridges cannot be understated: we're talking about real dumbfucktards.
I see such idiots daily, in all venues of life: the world is simply really full of dumbfucks.
It's simply how things are and we shouldn't be afraid of pointing it out.
today at 9:54 PM
Wait until they discover theyâre all filled with butane as a refrigerant.
today at 1:32 PM
I wonder if AI would have helped in this situation.
For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human.
I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application.
"But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...
today at 8:12 PM
In all likelihood, AI enabled this to happen in the first place.
today at 5:07 PM
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?
today at 7:26 PM
Even if you are keeping updated buying your new fridge every 2 years like the manufacturer wants, that still doesn't guarantee you are out of the woods from this issue. By definition, security patches are retroactive, after it has been made obvious that there has been a security incident.
today at 5:37 PM
Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?
On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).
today at 5:20 PM
I'd hope what we'll actually see is people finally demanding that appliances with no need of an internet connection don't get connected to the internet!
today at 5:39 PM
I would expect a refrigerator to work 20+ years. What does a legacy product even mean this situation?
today at 6:02 PM
The article makes it sound like these were intentionally networked refrigerator control units, not the actual refrigerators. But Iâm not an expert, so I canât rule out that itâs not possible to run a commercial refrigerator without one of these.
today at 5:23 PM
I mean, you could also argue that the lack of reliance on physical controls caused the incident in part. For example, a City's public works department may have remote access/control for some of their equipment, but they also have a kill switch that removes all connectivity and reverts the system to a default setting. They also have checks in place like "if the unit heater will be overamped, turn it off." This seems like it was caused by a lack of security considerations when making these devices "online". Old tech can work very well for a long time as long as it is modernized correctly.
today at 12:30 PM
... Feels like deja vu. Didn't the US military just have this happen at its military exchanges... a month or two ago?
Yes, yes they did. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/...
"ALL freezers went into defrost mode â ALL frozen food has spoiled".
today at 3:51 PM
I realized upon reading too this was the same Danfoss fridges that got hit for .mil bases in the US. There's probably a shodan signature to find them on the internet because HVAC people don't know about network security, and someone has a trivial exploit to access them due to shitty ancient embedded controller security in them.
today at 12:56 PM
This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
today at 1:13 PM
Yeah I remember that, and it seems like the military was very hush-hush about the cause. Now I wonder if they were hacked too.
today at 2:04 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
today at 8:40 PM
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
today at 12:38 PM
Yes, not exactly "unprecedented." The news of Commissaries having their freezers hacked should have been a kick in the rump for everyone else with infrastructure needlessly connected to the Internet.
today at 1:17 PM
the sort of people doing this security posture definitely are not up to date on the latest security news...
It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
today at 2:32 PM
[dead]
today at 4:39 PM
How in the name of fuck was a fridge even designed to be able to heat itself to 50 degrees C?
today at 4:57 PM
Fridges tend to have built-in defrost cycles these days. Without that, ice builds up around the coils that ordinarily cool the compartment (and by extension the ambient moisture in the air, encouraging it to condense). And you'd have to thaw it yourself from time to time.
today at 7:17 PM
50C seems a bit overkill for a defrost cycle.
today at 7:27 PM
today at 4:55 PM
It's probably just running the heat pump in the other direction. 50° sounds about right for the hot side. I expect that the hotter the better, because it will melt the frost without warming the food. And if a bad guy hacks in to the freezer, he can probably override any kind of temperature control and just tell the compressor to run full out.
today at 4:56 PM
Every refrigerator has a defrost cycle - which is just a heater. It normally only runs for a few minutes at a time, but if you change some bits around, it could run for a lot longer and a lot hotter.
today at 4:53 PM
I thought that. Now looking for the heat setting on my fridge. I guess itâs in case you need to antifridge sometimes.
today at 5:58 PM
Here's a fix:
if(temp > 5) return;
today at 4:30 PM
Please, let this be the stone that starts the avalanche of consumers rejecting smart apppliances.
My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just canât help themselves apparently.
today at 4:45 PM
I don't disagree, but having remote monitoring capabilities on a professional fridge is most likely not a hipster feature. Even mid-size supermarkets have dozens of them, with different temperature settings; they can fail, customers can block the doors, etc. You do want to receive an alert when something is wrong.
today at 5:15 PM
Those devices should be connected to air-gapped local network and not to manufacturer.
today at 6:01 PM
You don't seem to understand what these systems do at all. Air gapped takes about 80% of the usefulness away.
today at 4:34 PM
Why the fuck does a fume hood need that?!?!?!?!
today at 4:36 PM
> Why the fuck does a fume hood need that?!?!?!?!
Why, so you can turn it on from your smartphone when you're out of town, of course!
today at 5:12 PM
"Oh, Honey, I think we forgot to turn the stove off!"
"Well, I can't help you there, but I can turn off the fume hood from my phone!"
"..."
today at 5:13 PM
But it's Bluetooth so short range only? So it's not even good for that?
today at 4:35 PM
Exactly!
today at 5:41 PM
These are industrial fridges, the ones almost the size of a shipping container that you find in major supermarkets. But I agree with you that 'smart' home IoT is a shitshow.
today at 4:33 PM
What compelled you to buy a stove hood with a cpu and blutooth radio?
today at 4:35 PM
It was there when we moved in.
today at 4:41 PM
Would have been a red flag for me on the apartment tour haha. I once leased a place like this. Paid app needed to receive packaged mail. Never again.
today at 4:31 PM
Why would this time be any different than the last hundred times?
today at 4:32 PM
Honestly I like smart appliances. For example, I have a home assistant integration that will sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room, and a handful of other similar safety-related conditions.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
today at 4:34 PM
sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room
Can you turn that off or do you just have to put up with the noise?
today at 5:31 PM
It's a situation that shouldn't happen in the first place; house rule is someone should be around if the stove is on.
Of course we can control it, it's all wired up via Home Assistant.
today at 4:34 PM
I prefer the freedom of putting a pot of water on to boil and walking off to take a leak, personally. That would drive me absolutely insane.
today at 5:35 PM
1. We prefer to be safe, and shut the burner off while going to take a leak. It helps that we have a several thousand watt induction stove that boils pots of water in a few minutes, so there is no real need to parallelize boiling water with bathroom breaks.
We specifically want to prevent scenarios like: you take a leak, the leak turns into a shitting session or a phone call, you forgot you left the burner on.
2. Most of the time my wife and I make food together so if one person needs to take a leak the other one is around anyway.
3. For long slow cooking, we have plenty of comfy seating in the kitchen/dining area where we can get work done while being in sight of pots.
4. We have 2 pets we'd need to locate in an emergency, and so we tend to put electrical and fire safety higher than most people.
today at 1:14 PM
today at 12:32 PM
TomsHardware hit? I'm getting spinning beachballs on this link
today at 1:17 PM
[flagged]
today at 4:53 PM
Of all the things to put on a network, this ranks as one of the dumbest, ever. You don't need control of the unit done over a network, just the data on whether it is working or not. Anything else is simply asking for someone else to come along and break your stuff.
To boot, refrigeration has been wholly automatic for decades. It literally runs itself. It doesn't need any network connectivity other than to say "I work" and "I'm broken" and that's it. Allowing control commands to be sent over the network is, yet again, just asking for trouble.
today at 1:39 PM
I feel no pity for them at all. If they're too stupid to secure their fridges (which seem to be accessible over the internet) than that's their deserved pain.
today at 12:51 PM
Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet.
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
today at 1:44 PM
Russia will never attack NATO, that would be their death knell. NATO is a hundred times stronger than Ukraine, who are kicking Russia's ass as we speak. I even suspect that if Putin were to order an attack he would be put down by his own people.
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
today at 1:54 PM
> Russia will never attack NATO
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.
today at 7:16 PM
Russia is leading these efforts in the way of Sun Tzu and all that ânever stop an enemy in the process of making a mistake.â
today at 8:47 PM
I think they're actively encouraging said mistakes. The UK PM came out and confirmed they were behind Brexit the other day: https://kyivindependent.com/russia-behind-britains-brexit-vo...
today at 2:13 PM
Look at the former Soviet republics that helped Russia win WWII by supplying it with an almost limitless supply of soldiers. All of them have refused to allow their citizens to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Their political influence, even with right-wing politicians who might be skewed their way, will be limited. And could change at any moment as we've seen with Orban.
today at 6:37 PM
> And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Russia continued WW1 with a civil war that lasted until 1922. Their military deaths were quite evenly split between the world war stage and the civil war stage.
today at 8:27 PM
Literally everything youâve stated is false. Every statement.
A) Lots of Russians died during WW2, it wasnât âevil Russia sends troops from occupied republics to fight for them while Russians sit backâ.
B) Lots of mercenaries from post-Soviet republics fight for money on Russias side now
C) Russia didnât pull out because theyâve run out of men. Where did you get this?
today at 10:06 PM
Of course many Russians died too. But the bulk of the casualties were Soviet soldiers from the Asian republics.
There are a couple of good WWI documentaries on YouTube which you can watch for free. You'll find that C) is the truth.
today at 7:30 PM
> because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict
I wonder where then the millions of soldiers that fought the russian civil war came from.
today at 7:10 PM
> NATO is a hundred times stronger than Ukraine,
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.
today at 8:45 PM
Also, everyone thought Russia would take Ukraine in a few days.
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.
today at 7:21 PM
I would like this to be true but I'm not sure (at least when talking about NATO = Continental Europe). A quick search reveals Russia made 41 jet fighters last year, Europe made 40.
I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.
GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.
today at 7:28 PM
> Russia will never attack NATO
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.
today at 8:23 PM
You do know that wars are not âmuh supurmun is bazzilion times stronger than your balk!!â?
Russia doesnât 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. Itâs 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 âPhoney warâ. Chances are we might witness Russia just steam rolling Baltics while the West talks between each other what to do next.
today at 7:48 PM
> This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network
So the current incident was a preemptive alert by Brussels.
today at 3:00 PM
Russia is out of diesel because they're shipping it to Trump.
today at 3:17 PM
Drones run on diesel?
today at 8:08 PM
They presumably run on jet fuel, which is not very far off from diesel.
today at 4:26 PM
the world runs on diesel: ships, trucks, tractors, trains
today at 6:36 PM
They were out of diesel before Trump's announcement.
today at 12:57 PM
Russia cannot invade Europe, that is nonsense peddled by the EU establishment to support their idiotic military Keynesianism as part of a plan to reboot EU manufacturing.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
today at 1:09 PM
To be fair, that they are struggling to take over a couple of villages in Ukraine is in large parts due to the intensified arms and ammunition production of the entire EU (and in the past that of the US). And that's only enough for a standstill
today at 1:19 PM
Ukraine did a spectacular job to stop the full-scale invasion in the initial hours, days and weeks when there wasn't much international help yet though (and I guess from that moment on the war didn't go quite according to plan from the Russian PoV).
today at 1:35 PM
Letâs not underestimate the corruption within Russian intelligence services, that resulted in invasion without any meaningful military planning. They spent the budgets corrupting Ukrainian elites and brainwashing population of the Eastern Ukraine, probably taking a cut in their own pockets, but they were not expecting to be held accountable for the result. The success of Ukraine in early days was in the element of surprise. Their resistance was not expected by Russian leadership, and the invasion itself was not expected by the middle ranks of Russian military. It did not go according to the plan, but plans change, and this war demonstrated weaknesses of all major powers - in a way, Russia did tick some boxes. As successful Ukrainians were in that moment, NATO has lost the war for them failing to mobilize in time, also taken by the surprise (as if CIA werenât warning months ahead that this is going to happen). If Patriots, tanks and ammo would start flowing in the first weeks, maybe we would see peace in Istanbul accords in 2022 already.
today at 7:08 PM
They did a spectacular job, but there were already quite a few NATO weapons shipped to them since 2014.
today at 1:27 PM
Ukraine took out a Yandex data center, which made the pro Trump bot traffic drop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw0k0g57mk3zo
today at 1:39 PM
The article you linked to says nothing about the connection to pro-Trump bot traffic fyi
today at 1:51 PM
[dead]
today at 2:49 PM
Ukraine could've done much better if they'd mobilized and fortified their borders before the invasion. But Zelensky refused to do so (despite warnings from the U.S.) because war with Russia was hugely impopular with voters in Ukraine before the actual attack. They'd much rather stick their heads in the sand.
So a lot of their territorial loss can be attributed to his inaction. If they'd laid several million landmines in the Donbass the Russian attack would've been stumped and the occupied Crimea would've been easy prey.
today at 7:13 PM
Did they have capacity to do that at the time? Maybe Russia's first move would simply be elsewhere. there is a lot of border to mine especially when you include belarus.
today at 9:07 PM
They could've acquired the landmines from the U.S. since Biden was in the White House at the time.
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.
today at 10:01 PM
That's the thing though, between russia and belarus its over a 1000 mile border they would have had to secure.
today at 7:12 PM
That is fair to say today, but not when the war began.
today at 7:23 PM
Afaik this really isn't true. Most of the drone parts used both by Russia and Ukraine are coming from China, or Soviet surplus.
It used to be much more true. The Biden admin sent a lot more US weapons to fight Russia, Trump used to be much more amenable to send similar weapons provided somebody paid for it.
Nowadays US materiel is either tied up in the middle east or somewhere else (Patriots), or has been neutralized by Russian EW (HIMARS), or the US is just unwilling to part with it for whatever justification.
today at 1:19 PM
Standstill with Ukraine looks bad, and authoritarian regimes can survive almost anything except looking bad.
Responding to a NATO âattackâ 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.
today at 2:55 PM
Nuclear weapons are no option. Russia would be wiped off the map before they could push that button.
A single Tomahawk missile could obliterate Moscow which would immediately end the war because Russia is extremely centralized. It's the reason almost 80% of all Russian SAM capability is stationed around the city.
Putin is unpredictable but he's not stupid. You don't become president of Russia by being stupid.
today at 8:35 PM
> A single Tomahawk missile could obliterate Moscow
Do you even know how big Moscow is? And nuclear Tomahawks were discontinued. Even if they werenât, youâd need dozens to obliterate Moscow.
today at 9:34 PM
The Kremlin isn't that big you know.
today at 6:28 PM
Putin is extremelly predictable, which allows the western warmongers to do nefarious things knowing very well heâll assess the long term risks and be very cautious and accept limited damage to prevent a larger conflict. Use your grey matter and think logically instead of parroting propaganda.
today at 8:35 PM
> western warmongers
Who attacked Ukraine, again?
today at 1:07 PM
Large scale invasion is not likely, but they could try some limited operation to test NATO's unity. Most likely location would be somewhere in the Baltics.
today at 1:27 PM
Lmao they literally assassinate people with nerve agents on British soil as is and get told they're naughty boys and not to do it again please.
I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).
today at 1:27 PM
I have read some Asian country's (who are friendly with Russians) government foreign affairs required readings that is like 2 year old by now. Those materials say Russia is being cornered. They had no other option to but to invade Ukraine. But with sanctions they are more cornered and are desparate. They thought China would ally would them but China's selective neutrality is making them desparate. Those documents say that Russia never actually deployed their main regiments and only worked with mercenaries and allied country armies.
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
today at 1:40 PM
> They had no other option to but to invade Ukraine
This is of course a stupid lie they are telling themselves. They've been invading Ukraine since 2014. They had the option of being good international citizens, with an elite flying to the west and buying some football teams for their entertainment, but they chose not to do that.
> Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that.
Russia can retreat inside their internationally recognized borders at any time. The problem is they don't want to sue for peace because that would admit losing, and include losing illegally annexed territory. They've made no serious attempts at even starting negotiations with Europe, while escalating "hybrid warfare".
today at 8:30 PM
I might struggle to occupy your garden, but how are you going to stop me from drilling holes in your house and planting lots of rats so they destroy your life and you run away yourself?
today at 1:14 PM
Not Europe but a few Baltic states are feasible. No one says they can hold it, but Putin has his own reasons so we should not think we can conclude on future Russian actions based on what we consider reasonable - e.g. no one predicted that a war on Ukraine was likely as it seemed to be completely irrational and self-defeating.
If nothing else, war has been many times convenient to keep regimes in power (see Bush post 9/11 for an obvious example). Putin might want to strengthen his case. See absurd discussions / push for a "Republic of Narva" as an example cause belli.
today at 2:23 PM
May sound like nitpicking, but the Baltic states are Europe both geographically and organizationally (eg members of the EU).
today at 7:25 PM
âThe West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path,â Mearsheimer averred in 2015, âand the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.â
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 itâs self-defeating for Russia is a mistake of analysis. The war logically follows from Russiaâs security goals.
today at 8:48 PM
> The war logically follows from Russiaâs 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.
today at 1:09 PM
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
today at 7:31 PM
> They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
Because Russian leadership is acting in self interest and preservation and a neverending state of war might be what secures its own position and power.
today at 2:56 PM
Europe is rearming on the lines of the 1930s, because Russia is struggling to take a couple of villages.
They can't take Kiev but they're threatening Paris.
today at 1:37 PM
They cannot win, but they can invade. We're already in a hybrid war. The threat is real and Europe needs to be prepared and be able to stand on its own, especially now that also the US is not only directly threatening EU countries, but is acting against EU security both globally and internally by supporting separatist neo-Nazi pro-Putin parties.
today at 5:12 PM
What genius decided to connect a fridge to the Internet? Make him pay the losses.
By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.
today at 6:48 PM
Here in the UK, there's a ÂŁ500 subsidy for home EV charge points... but only if they're connected to the internet.
What could possibly go wrong?
today at 7:02 PM
"What could possibly go wrong?"
The grid could stabilize as a side effect. And the cars are already connected to the internet.
today at 5:25 PM
people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
today at 5:28 PM
You could connect to an on-premise server. As a bonus, the manufacturer cannot disable them and extort money in this case.
today at 6:34 PM
They most likely are. Third party techs then access them over Citrix or VPN/RDP. There could be some cloud portion that aggregates data or pushes policies and schedules as well.
today at 5:31 PM
If the only usecase is monitoring, then why make the fridges anything else but report-only?
No firmware updates. no admin configuration. no ssh backdoors. just a transmit-only system
today at 5:39 PM
because the report code might have bugs
today at 5:44 PM
If it were transmit only, you could put it behind a data diode and buggy report code wouldn't matter. Even better, validating the code is a lot easier if it doesn't accept attacker input.
today at 5:29 PM
Monitoring requires one-way announcements, not bi-directional connections
today at 6:07 PM
It sounds like you are victim blaming. I apologize in advance if I interpreted you incorrectly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
today at 7:40 PM
> t sounds like you are victim blaming.
It sounds like you think victims are necessarily blameless.
today at 6:32 PM
Yes, I always find it very useful to condemn the mosquitoes when someone is bitten. If they aren't heartily condemned, they will be legitimized and emboldened.
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
today at 6:46 PM
We can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes. Especially the female ones.
today at 7:04 PM
No, we should not. Only those who bite humans and carry disease. (The vast majority does not)
today at 7:23 PM
Until we do, I'm going to continue to blame you for being bitten.
today at 6:39 PM
Gallipolli, 1915:
"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.
today at 6:48 PM
Please find me a new car that isn't Internet-connected, genius. You're assuming consumers have a meaningful alternative.
today at 7:01 PM
Turns out it's mandated by law in the EU too
today at 7:12 PM
Wait till they'll mandate other things done to you via your car via the internet. ALl in the name of protecting you and the kids of course.
today at 7:09 PM
Easy, go to the used lot and get one of the remaining actual cars before they become collectible antiques.
today at 7:16 PM
Buying a car is the easy part.
In my experience, new cars have new car problems, but old cars have old car problems.
Thereâs no clear winner in every metric, just trade offs.
today at 7:31 PM
The lesson is, always expect to be paying to maintain your vehicle.
today at 6:58 PM
Slate says âany minute now!â
today at 5:21 PM
Offtopic: I only see "genius" used these days to describe an idiot. I guess this is how words change meaning over time. At some point in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
today at 5:44 PM
That's because calling an idiot an idiot plainly is apparently considered uncouth and attracts downvotes, flags and downvotes often mean oblivion. In fact you will find do-gooders chome in with "be civil" but you flip the word and it's all kosher. The thing is all of us do and say idiotic things. So that makes a bit tricky indeed.
> in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
If you are not a genius and someone calls you a genius, well, for you the future is already here, genius! (Shit I didn't really mean that :P)
today at 6:49 PM
I don't think the definition is changing at all. To me, we've just lost the ability to comprehend sarcasm.
today at 5:28 PM
There should be a name for this style of speech, using "good" to mean "bad".
today at 5:33 PM
Irony? Camp? âgenius is a camp - so good that itâs badâ. âIn the sentence âthis is the sh1tâ, âsh1tâ is camp - so bad that it is goodâ.
today at 6:20 PM
Semantic inversion or contronym
today at 5:33 PM
Sarcasm
today at 6:30 PM
Thereâs a lot of this in African-American vernacular. Iâm not exactly sure what a âbad bitchâ means but I believe it means attractive whore, but does it or does it just mean a good woman? Either way thatâs two traditionally negative terms that seem to be used positively.
today at 5:33 PM
just like 'Nimrod' becoming an insult
today at 5:29 PM
Genius take!
today at 4:29 PM
Good. Iâm not happy that this happened. Thatâs a large financial loss. I donât like thinking about all the good, edible food thrown away instead of nourishing people. But the infosec thing that keeps me up at night is the utter lack of SCADA security. âRelax! This dam wonât collapse as long as no one guesses our public IP address!â
Lots of industrial controls havenât been updated since they were deployed in the 90âs. âAnd why should they be? If it ainât brokenâŠâ Well, because theyâre freaking broken!
So Iâm 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 youâre glad no one blew up a gas pipeline⊠yet.
today at 5:12 PM
There is certainly a need to raise awareness of the danger of connected/online devices. If something is connected to the public Internet then it can be attacked. If something has built-in wireless connectivity then it can be attacked. Unfortunately it really is as simple as that. Safeguards are needed accordingly.
Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most. There have been numerous examples of lax security in this area already and a fleet of rogue cars or delivery trucks could obviously cause huge amounts of damage, injury, and loss of life.
There's a legacy of openness in car tech and software that was never designed with robust security and isolation of critical components in mind. I've heard that this has started to change more recently and that's reassuring if true. But this still feels like an area with far too little regulation or oversight given the past choices of vehicle manufacturers and far too much rush to connect everything up remotely even for minor convenience reasons.
In some cases there also now seems to be legally mandated connectivity for things like automated emergency calls after an accident. This should at least have a genuine benefit in the unfortunate situation that it's needed - but until vehicle security looks more like Fort Knox than a sandcastle it might still prove to be a bad choice in the end.
today at 5:50 PM
> Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most.
Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. Find the cellular modem fuse and pull it. You now have a modern, but fully offline car. Security aside, connected cars are absolutely awful for your privacy.
today at 7:45 PM
Unfortunately that straightforward solution might also compromise other aspects of the vehicle and/or might also be illegal if it disables a mandatory safety system.
The "straightforward" solution is to tell vehicle manufacturers that they aren't allowed to sell vehicles with connectivity unless they also have proper security and privacy protections in place. If no-one can give them money for it then they won't do it.
today at 6:57 PM
That's a workaround, not a solution. And a partial one at that since it only affects your own vehicle; you'll still be in danger from other people's connected vehicles.
today at 7:01 PM
[dead]
today at 5:37 PM
from https://blog.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controll... :
> 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.
today at 7:09 PM
[dead]
today at 12:28 PM
Great. We already waste a ton of food, letâs destroy even more.
today at 12:52 PM
It's probably a small drop compared to the overall amounts of wasted food. I guess the hope is that it will teach some people important lessons, like "your refrigerator shouldn't be connected to the Internet, and if it absolutely has to, take some time to consider security".
today at 12:47 PM
these are the visible effects of a hybrid war, not the pranks of script kids
today at 3:52 PM
This is terrible. But, at the same time, why now? This seems like something you'd want to hold onto for use later as a nation state. And there's no money to be made here since you can't really ransom it. Was this just a petty attack to scare the public?
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
today at 5:39 PM
> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer
I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).
today at 4:34 PM
Manufacturer abdicated saying those models are no longer supported and so not receive security updates.
Wonderful world we live in where refrigerators and cars also become e-waste because a manufacturer gets tired of patching them
today at 5:19 PM
> 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.
today at 4:18 PM
Who benefits from chaos? There is a war raging in Europe, maybe start there
today at 4:32 PM
Exactly. This is fifth generation warfare.
today at 4:57 PM
Unrestricted warfare is a book more people read to be aware of
today at 4:07 PM
Script kiddies are on LLM steroids now. Iâm so glad I kept my home "smart" stuffs fully disconnected from any network. No, I canât control my home temperature from the other side of the world when in vacation, and so canât the rest of the world until they physically enter it.
today at 7:59 PM
Alternative theory: Google's "mea culpa" on "misalignment incident" while testing the agents using their "next gen frontier model" is coming out in three... two... one...
today at 4:12 PM
I think that's exactly what happened. A kid found out (via an LLM or otherwise) that fridges' temperature were remotely controlled, probably with lax security (or no security at all) and decided to play with it.
It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control; a supermarket is a place where there are always people, it's not a base on Mars. And even if a remote is needed, it should probably not go further than the manager's office.
today at 4:14 PM
> It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control
I donât know to what degree control is needed, but remote supervision of cold holding temperatures is good to make sure food doesnât spoil. Most places that donât have networked fridges have staff manually logging the cold holding temperatures to make sure things are working.
Again, though, I donât know about making changes though.
today at 4:20 PM
In this case it's not like the devices were turned off, they were put on "defrost" which means heating up to 50°C (122°F). Why would you need the ability to remotely set all your fridges to defrost??
today at 4:39 PM
One possibility is that itâs maybe useful for the fleet operator to be able to remotely update firmware and the attacker used that.
The other, more likely, answer is that thereâs 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.
today at 4:43 PM
I remember having to do this every few hours 25 years ago when working at a store part-time as a student.
Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.
today at 4:36 PM
15 years ago a retail chain i worked for had all their HVAC thermostats centrally managed by corporate. This isn't new and it is stupid but how else do you ensure shareholders keep every possible cent of profit (in the short term of course)
today at 7:15 PM
Superstore had a few episodes about the consequences of that.
today at 4:44 PM
> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
Wow, are you an optimist. The manufacturer has stated that they're past the period of security updates. And others... meaning the supermarkets? They outsource that. The people they outsource it to? Maybe they'll start paying attention to security.
today at 4:43 PM
> why now?
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.
today at 5:22 PM
Come election day, do you really think many people's deciding factor would be a supermarket refrigerator incident from half a year ago? Especially considering that around the same time something far more... shall I say politically meaningful was happening at the same time, such as students protesting the lack of school funding?
today at 5:53 PM
This is just one in a thousand problems that will happen until that day. A high velocity train wagon was set on flames today, blocking the railway and creating chaos among thousands of passengers that try to return home after the holidays. Why?, because it makes the government look bad, and inflicts maximum pain on people, just when Spain is also about to celebrate elections. Angry people vote the loudest voices.
In France this benefits the pro-Russian Lepen's party with the "government is a disaster but we will make them pay for your suffering". Page "16" of the manual. In the end is all the same handbook all around the planet.
Just by the record, EU has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia so yes, they know. The more desperate grows Russia, the more this will happen. Until it will stop, suddenly, for no reason.
today at 4:25 PM
You assume there must be some nation state behind it.
But it could be just for the lulz.
Remember the hackers behind the seven proxies, AntiSec, which hacked the NATO library website, and went to prison for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec
today at 8:31 PM
Remind me again why I should buy an internet-connected refrigerator?
today at 4:33 PM
This is literally everything that's wrong with the modern tech industry in a nutshell:
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
They sell fricken refrigerators for God's sake. Maybe I can understand planned obsolescence for a cell phone, but a fridge? And especially to grocery stores that operate on razor thin margins to begin with, the idea that they'll just dump their old working refrigerators because the manufacturer refused security updates is a guaranteed recipe for stuff like this.
today at 5:55 PM
Danfoss are quoted as naming two systems, AK-SM800 and AK-SC355.
AK-SM800 looks like a current product. Danfoss have a PDF dated 2026.06 about it: https://assets.danfoss.com/documents/latest/590332/BC3376298.... This mentions "All new Electronics platform supporting new Operating System (based on Linux)", and specifically advises against connecting it to the internet.. Reading between the lines, especially section 10.5, it sounds like there was a major security revamp in 'release 4.0'. The article mentions "outdated firmware", so perhaps that refers to things before 4.0.
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.
today at 5:04 PM
It is a way to move the responsibility to the "users".
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...
today at 5:21 PM
Ugh, this is even worse. The vuln was just disclosed a couple months ago, and so it was literally just a matter of time if not all systems were patched.
I can't for the life of me understand why these systems aren't air gapped, or at the very least network access is restricted to a small number of IPs or hardware keys.
today at 4:38 PM
I have to question why this control system was even in place.
I could see remote monitoring (of temps) and logging on the system (cycle time etc) but does one really need to control the defrost cycle? It's probably just a web interface on a single controller that used to be accessed by HVAC techs only.
> > "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
Because it's the EU I have to wonder if they will finally mandate that software go into escrow and be released if support stops.
today at 5:21 PM
> 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 âwaste as soon as {corp} is done with itâ
today at 4:38 PM
Grocery stores do not use standalone refrigerators, Iâm not sure why I have to keep repeating this fact when every single person has been in a grocery store and seen refrigerated cases that have a dozen or more doors.
They use cold cases and have rooftop or outdoor condensing units and evaporators inside of the cold cases/freezers/etc. Thereâs refrigerant piping running all over the place and thereâs a bunch of sensors and relays that are automated to manage the refrigeration system.
My assumption is the Danfoss control system theyâre using is EOL, itâs the grocerâs responsibility to upgrade their automation equipment if itâs unsupported.
today at 5:23 PM
No need to make assumption here, the article says it clearly:
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates". It said its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 fridge regulator systems were notably affected, with a version of the former using "outdated firmware". It added that it had long advised supermarkets to update from those models.
That being said I am curious what is typically the amount of time for software support offered on a newly released equipment and how common it is for super market to use obsolete software (especially for the part which carry some security risk like something with remote control). Also what about the insurance? Will they (fully) cover the financial loss? I don't know what is in their insurance contract and I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that using obsolete software make the supermarket responsible to some extent
today at 5:52 PM
> how common it is for super market to use obsolete software (especially for the part which carry some security risk like something with remote control).
It's a near guarantee. I've been in dozens of power plants where the engineering workstations or operator interface terminals are running Windows XP or Windows 7. More than zero of which were not properly air-gapped. If those sites (with sizable CapEx budgets) delay upgrading for various reasons I would expect grocery store chains to keep whatever they have running until it's broken to the point of not being fixable without a complete overhaul.
today at 4:56 PM
I assume youâre talking about a system like this:
https://www.danfoss.com/en/industries/food-and-beverage/dcs/...
today at 5:20 PM
I'm with you on the remote monitoring but why do we need remote control?
Dispatch an HVAC tech if an alarm comes up. Physical access should be the only way to shut down a system like this.
today at 5:31 PM
> 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.
today at 6:16 PM
> It can be done safely with proper access controls.
gestures broadly
today at 5:17 PM
That doesn't excuse them being controllable over the Internet. I can understand that remote monitoring is important, but it's in a supermarket. There's always going to be somebody on site who can control things locally. The telemetry can be transmitted via data diode, automatically re-transmitting on schedule so there's no need for any remote control.
today at 5:28 PM
> There's always going to be somebody on site who can control things locally.
No, there is not always someone onsite with the experience and knowledge to monitor and change the system. Grocery stores do not have staff refrigeration techs onsite, they contract that out.
today at 5:35 PM
There's always going to be a manager with access to keys. They get the HVAC tech on the phone and set the controls as instructed. They're still vulnerable to somebody scamming them into setting the controls wrong, but they at least have a chance of recognizing who they're talking to, and recognizing obviously crazy instructions (e.g. "turn the thermostat up to 50 degrees"). And even if they don't, the attack is a lot harder to scale with a human in the loop.
today at 7:53 PM
Then maybe companies should stop firing people with experience and knowledge. Maybe they served a purpose after all.
The family run supermarket I'm very familiar with that eventually was taken over by Hannaford absolutely had their own HVAC techs. Years ago at least.
You know what Hannaford did to that store after they bought it? They said that it would have to be a "smaller" store in their system, with less product diversity, fewer departments, less attention, less investment.
Do you know what that store was famous for, and why Hannaford placed it as the center of that deal? Because it did really really well, ran very profitably, and was essentially preferred by the (poor) community despite the Walmart 10 miles away. This store was so well run in the opinion of Hannaford Corporate, that they gave the former assistant manager, who had a working relationship with Hannaford for 20 years, priority over other internal applicants for high level management roles in order to get him to fix their problems at other stores. They lost another valuable manager due to that decision!
Their problems at another store were that it takes in $1 million a day but they refuse to pay more than local minimum wage to staff it. They struggled to keep that store staffed well, and this store in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the area looked like shit because stuff was never done.
Hannaford is currently seeing incredibly stiff competition from Market Basket and Costco. People who have trusted Hannaford (in the new england way where it means something) their entire lives are turncoating to Market Basket because why the hell not? It's just a store. They all suck. They can't compete on prices because distributors and upstream corporate behemoths set the prices. They can't compete on quality, because they buy that product from the exact same truck. The company explicitly has chosen to go the direction of competing on vibes of "Upmarket" product lines from the in house brand.
You know what Hannaford didn't do? Raise wages. You know what that Manager eventually did? He re-retired and gave up the good pay, good benefits, reliable and easy income to trade for being a physical laborer and building decks for rich people, because then nobody will be so stupid as to tell him to not do the things that he knows would improve things, and has the 40 year career to back it up. Hannaford had been courting him since the 90s, because that's literally how competent he was. This man went back to destroying his body, after a diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis, After a new Marriage, after economic uncertainty, because he literally wasn't allowed to be a good fucking manager of a business that he has known in his bones for decades. They didn't let him solve all their problems! Because either that would have affected how they want their profits to work, or because that's just how stupidly pig-headed and petty the modern Executive class is.
today at 5:14 PM
âGod news shareholders! We have decided that we didnât make enough sales this quarter so we have EOLed a whole range of products!â
today at 5:25 PM
I understand youâre being sarcastic, but yes, eventually technology gets better so a manufacturer refreshes their product line. This is extremely common in many industries.
today at 6:05 PM
They do but they continue to service the old lines for quite a long time. This is not consumer grade equipment, it represents a large capital expense and also at stake is valuable inventory. The consumer "you're SOL when the warranty expires" approach won't fly.
today at 5:40 PM
"French supermarkets hacked because this is common in many industries". Maybe it should not be common? Maybe selling internet connected industrial plant means those things must be supported forever?
today at 1:08 PM
Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
today at 2:08 PM
> Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
I wonder how many more decades of screaming into the void will be required for it to be taken seriously by those who deny any/all security efforts until after the disaster has already happened (and then still will only approve the absolute minimum required efforts)...
today at 2:47 PM
Well, if we start counting from Morris worm, without liability in place, plenty more.
today at 9:51 PM
Formal methods for reliable software and properly configured systems secure by default.
today at 1:15 PM
Of course the bigger question is why a refrigerator is even a "connected device".
today at 1:19 PM
Because it is cool! (pun intended)
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.
today at 1:19 PM
So they can monitor if something goes wrong, have a tech troubleshoot and deploy with the right parts.
Modern HVAC and fire control b systems for buildings are often connected now as well
today at 7:30 PM
You can do that while gapping the actual fridge function. Network connected temp probe and dumb fridge. These sort of systems are used in lab setting where its all dumb fridges and freezers, and very precious things inside.
today at 1:27 PM
Yes it was more of a rhetorical question, e.g. maybe we need to rethink that whole idea of plugging everything into the internet and instead go back to air-gapped "local area networks".
It also wouldn't be a big deal when a supermarket employee makes an old-fashioned phone call (gasp!) to the refrigerator service company when some red light starts blinking ;)
today at 9:49 PM
It would be unfortunate if the red light starts blinking at midnight.
today at 1:52 PM
The poor fellow, or gal, now has to endure AI bots while trying to call support on the phone.
today at 2:00 PM
While the app is beeping at them to pack more shelves, and they have already used up their only toilet break of the day to trying to stop the resourcing AI chatbot from putting them on triple shifts for the rest of the week.
today at 1:52 PM
The trained and retained supermarket employees are gone. The refrigeration service engineer has been replaced by an AI chatbot. We can't scale to qualified people running complex systems on remote air-gapped networks.
today at 12:35 PM
Why is that even internet enabled?
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
today at 12:45 PM
My guess, its a service contractor type situation, like getting a smart meter. You can opt out, you just wont have power.
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
today at 1:03 PM
Somebody wrote the software that is the interface between the fridge and the internet. And while it would be nice if HVAC technicians would remember to only make this software accessible via VPN, it is in fact possible to write software that is reachable from the internet while still being secure
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
today at 1:10 PM
Of course its "possible" for it to be secure, but the people involved are not experts.
The grocer likely has the least expertise. The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
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).
today at 2:39 PM
> Of course its "possible" for it to be secure, but the people involved are not experts.
They're selling network-accessible equipment so it's their duty to make it secure within some well-defined envelope. How's that any different from any other part of engineering and product development?
> "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws
Soon that will be the OEMs, per the EU Cyber Resilience Act [1]:
> Directive (EU) 2024/2853 [on liability for defective products] of the European Parliament and of the Council (16) is complementary to this Regulation. That Directive sets out liability rules for defective products so that injured persons can claim compensation when a damage has been caused by defective products. It establishes the principle that the manufacturer of a product is liable for damages caused by a lack of safety in their product irrespective of fault (strict liability). Where such a lack of safety consists in a lack of security updates after the placing on the market of the product, and this causes damage, the liability of the manufacturer could be triggered. Obligations for manufacturers that concern the provision of such security updates should be laid down in this Regulation.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/2847/oj/eng
today at 2:54 PM
Given the potential service contract nature of this particular situation, where the grocers signed a service agreement with HVAC companies, one would think the contract included clauses addressing this very situation, where a significant loss of inventory occurs. After all, the service being paid for is refrigeration.
With floor planning, the loss itself could be spread across multiple companies, under multiple insurance policies.
With that said, this particular hack could easily be a systems / networking "configuration error" and not any particular piece of softwares fault ( as in a bug, or hardcoded backdoor password. )
today at 1:20 PM
IoT platforms provided all the required functionality. Device provisioning (it is not easy to do identity on 'things'). MQTT for service-assisted communication where devices don't need to accept incoming connections. Over-the-air software updates. Over-the-air kernel security updates.
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
today at 1:30 PM
I just read the article again. It mentions "Danfoss" HVAC controls.
I happen to have a Danfoss HVAC controller here, and its controllable via Modbus. Its an older model, but its my understanding that larger HVAC systems commonly use Modbus.
Modbus systems are multi-drop serial, and the hack likely came in from the server side of one of the companies involved, and the HVAC controllers were all sent defrost commands. Thats my guess anyway.
I have a pump thats Modbus controllable as well, made by a company called Grundfos.
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. :(
today at 5:02 PM
Modbus is the equivalent of VGA connector in displays and projectors. It does have a TCP/IP version as well, but it has no security whatsoever. Or any features besides reading/writing a 16-bit value (or a single bit, charmingly referred to as "coil")
today at 5:16 PM
Absolutely.
I'm in the beginning stages of giving my home HVAC system an upgrade and using Modbus throughout with various adapter boards.
today at 1:45 PM
Yes, that is likely. Although Danfoss seems to have their own controllers, I think that you are right, that the attack was not an 'Internet connected fridge', but an HVAC or FMS (Facilities Management System) that was connected to the fridges.
today at 4:33 PM
My mistake. It is stupider than that. Facepalm.
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
today at 4:59 PM
Resubmit that article as its own headline. Good find.
today at 1:56 PM
In the 2013 Target attack, the attackers used the HVAC contractors' credentials to gain access to Target's systems. The point of sale credit card terminals (what customers swiped cards and enter PINs) had no real security so the attackers were able to make those get "updates" from their own servers and download malware enabling them to get the magnetic stripe information as well as PIN (for debit cards). That year, I (like about 150,000,000 other people) got a brand new credit card with a new credit card number.
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...
today at 1:29 PM
> Grocer w/ 2% margins
You have clearly never stepped foot inside an Albert Heijn store.
today at 1:33 PM
> 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.
today at 12:44 PM
Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible
today at 12:40 PM
someone, or something, needs to monitor the fridges remotely, which means networked thing with all the cute little details of the IOT tacked to it
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
today at 1:13 PM
Have you ever been to a grocery store?
These arenât consumer refrigerators, itâs a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. Itâs a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
today at 12:42 PM
Why is this even connected to the internet. If you want to monitor it remotely, you can set that independently from the actual controls.
today at 4:45 PM
> The software allows retailers to manage their cold units remotely.
Will they never learn?
today at 5:06 PM
To not control any industrial processes remotely? I hope you realize that requiring that would make solar and wind farms completely non-viable, among many, many other things.
today at 6:06 PM
Leased lines, MPLS, custom routing setups, hell just a VPN that fails closed. There are so many options for doing this, all more secure that just slapping a device online behind whatever router the cheapest ISP gave you.
The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.
Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.
today at 5:27 PM
Remote control does not mean "has a public IP address."
Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.
today at 6:27 PM
A public IP address may be a necessity, but with a properly configured VPN it is irrelevant whether anyone knows the public IP addresses.
today at 5:24 PM
Surely, there must be a way that does not force the devices onto world wide web..
today at 5:37 PM
Seems like 95% of devices could be managed with a hardware filter that only allows through a handful of very rudimentary signals (more like Morse code than a full digital transmission), and then of course a properly designed on-device API that defines those signals and doesn't allow you to trigger a defrost remotely, when that should only ever be done with somebody physically present for example.
today at 6:20 PM
Morse code is a fully digital transmission.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even âanalogâ) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.
today at 10:04 PM
The point is having the digital transmission simple enough that you can use fully *physical* filters to discard everything but the 3-4 messages you need through. Of course it is still digital, but my point is, it is a physically enforced studied, safe subset and doesn't allow for full network access. There are of course a variety of ways to further firewall that, but something needs to act like as much of an air gap as possible while allowing for remote communications.
today at 10:47 PM
How do you authenticate such a system? 3-4 âquasi analogâ messages seem incredibly easy to replay, if nothing else. If you need to depend on something actually cryptographic to make the system replay proof, you can just as well use that system for all aspects of access control. This makes no sense.
today at 5:23 PM
I'm interested to know how many "legacy" controllers no longer patched by the manufacturer are operating solar and wind farms today.
If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.
today at 5:03 PM
If they didn't do it that way, some bad things would happen: sometimes a fridge would fail and the food in that fridge would spoil.
today at 5:08 PM
* Fridges are welcome to send a panic message.
* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.
Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.
today at 7:41 PM
You're saying remote control stops a fridge failing? Or a fail spoiling the food?
I doubt the fridge has a remote-controlled robot arm to unload itself.
today at 5:52 PM
That's funny, last I checked my fridge keeps food reliably cold with no internet connection, and most supermarkets have people around all the time to notice such a failure, a plan around such a failure, and expect to have such a failure periodically since fridges break down anyway.
Meanwhile you can use analog gauges if you need perfect max temperature monitoring.
That's what always pisses me off about this. Someone brought up "Hey, if we connect this to the internet to enable that feature, someone will start hacking fridges and hurting our customers, and I don't think the stupid page with a temperature graph on it is worth that tradeoff", and some ass told them to get over it and implement it.
Raymond Chen used to write about feature development at Microsoft, specifically how every single new feature idea started from a negative position, since it requires support and testing and engineering and thought, and has future repercussions, so it's often not a good idea to just add box checking features.
Microsoft believed this in the 90s. For things like UI functionality. That's the effort and thought and restraint required to have a consistent UI, for things to be thought out.
Somehow, between then and now, the industry threw all that thought away, and now everything has 400 totally unused, half implemented, utterly broken features.
Why are we here? "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.
today at 9:42 PM
> "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.
That's termed Post-IPO problem. :)
today at 12:28 PM
[dead]
today at 12:39 PM
today at 4:10 PM
Why the fuck are those fridges even networked!?
today at 4:28 PM
Because they need remote monitoring. I have experience with HVAC so I'm guessing these are similar: typically outsourced to a third party, typically a VM running on a dedicated server, accessible by Citrix or something similar. Supermarkets don't internally staff fridge repairmen.
today at 4:38 PM
They could just use connected temperature probes though. no need to connect the power supply of the damn compressor to the internet.
today at 5:50 PM
A lot of these devices are temperature controllable as the product in them may require different temperatures. They can have temperature ranges from refrigeration to freezing.
Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.
today at 6:55 PM
You can schedule power usage with a dummy controller. I'm not sure of any products sold that are that specific to temp in my grocery store at least. Either it is refrigerated or frozen.
today at 5:17 PM
You don't need to network the fridge though... You just need a networked sensor...
today at 5:57 PM
That's assuming you just need to maintain a static temperature, which probably isn't the case.
today at 4:19 PM
None of the supermarkets were managed by Commander Adama, apparently.
today at 4:25 PM
today at 4:13 PM
Centralized maintenance and monitoring?
today at 4:26 PM
Monitoring makes sense, but it feels like it makes no sense at all to allow that kind of remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves.
Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.
today at 5:11 PM
> remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves
These are minimum wage workers - they don't have bean bags in the nap room, employee massages and stock options.
today at 4:29 PM
Supermarkets don't staff HVAC/fridge repairmen. There are separate companies they pay to do this.
today at 4:38 PM
Right: and someone from that company can come out and do maintenance when the monitoring indicates it's necessary
today at 5:20 PM
When, say, your internet craps out, would you rather your ISP try to resolve the problem, or schedule to send a tech out to your home before they start working on fixing the issue?
Groceries see HVAC in the same way. If they can get their issue addressed or diagnosed by their HVAC contractor without him having to schedule and physically travel to their site, they'd prefer him to solve/start solving the problem immediately. Time is money and the faster the tech can diagnose the problem, the faster he can get on fixing it.
And yes, the prevalence of these systems means that many HVAC techs have the ability to turn off their customers' air conditioners/fridges. They don't use it maliciously, because that would be actual suicide for their business.
---
Source: A close friend of mine runs an HVAC business (~8 employees) doing residential and commercial installs, repairs, and maintenance.
today at 4:14 PM
It seems like the sort of thing youâd do in-store and firewalled from the internet.
today at 4:20 PM
Youâd have to pay competent local staff for that.
today at 4:40 PM
How do you think grocery stores worked pre internet?
today at 8:50 PM
They were paying competent local staff pre-internet.
today at 5:17 PM
Lots of things worked pre-internet that now rely on internet in ways that would be rather chaotic and messy to undo.
today at 5:53 PM
You're going to have to convince VC and PE to give up the massive profits they're raking in.
today at 4:24 PM
The article didn't say they weren't.
today at 4:21 PM
"That, like, costs money, man. The accounting department said there was a 1-in-100 year chance of this happening if we didn't shell out, so we didn't." - the CEO, probably.
today at 4:39 PM
That might justify a temperature probe in a dumb fridge. This smells of a salesman being here not an engineer though.
today at 4:38 PM
Makes sense but monitoring doesn't mean you have to have remote control of power.
today at 4:48 PM
"Utility has alerted us to an upcoming brown-out in a region impacting 40 stores. Cool everything down a few extra degrees in preparation."
today at 5:29 PM
A phone call from the HVAC company and physical thermostat dial (in a locked cabinet to prevent incompetent/malicious employees tampering with it) seems a safer solution.
today at 6:08 PM
Some grocery stores - and this is probably far more common in France - have no staff overnight.
I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.
today at 5:56 PM
And when it happens at 3 in the morning? And when those people are in a meeting 10 miles down the road?
Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.
today at 5:19 PM
And centralized food destruction.
today at 4:42 PM
They arenât fridges, itâs a grocery store. You have obviously been in one, there are cases with a dozen doors that all open to the same cold case.
There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.
I shouldnât need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.
today at 5:30 PM
Given the perfectly workable alternative of not having remote monitoring and simply having the store manager contact a repair tech on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is an issue, yeah I think actually you do need to justify the added complexity and expense of making this kind of mundane equipment internet accessible.
today at 5:41 PM
From my experience in a restaurant, those large commercial rooftop refrigeration/freezer units need attention several times a year. It's rare that your home fridge would have trouble that often but commercial units are more complicated and in a harsher environment. And supermarket installations are probably even more complicated.
today at 7:09 PM
Routine service and maintenance doesn't require net connectivity to schedule.
today at 8:30 PM
Agreed. I was just addressing that it's not exceedingly rare to need to get a tech out on site to address something. Should the manager be on top of this, checking temps on all the cases every day? Absolutely, but I can see the argument for a more automated system of monitors/alarms that can get a tech dispatched before the manager has even noticed the problem.
today at 6:00 PM
These systems only exist because those economics were decided decades ago. Issues are not exceptions in systems like this. They are huge, complex, and interface with the public.
The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.
today at 7:07 PM
Marketing. The restaurant industry doesn't have less skin in the game than grocery retailers re avoiding spoilage and net connected walk-in coolers and freezers are not a thing.
today at 4:23 PM
So you can get a notification when the milk expires.
today at 4:13 PM
To monitor when something like this happens...
today at 4:12 PM
today at 4:54 PM
Wait until people living north of Chicago learn that their thermostats are remotely controlled, when it's -20F outside.
today at 1:02 PM
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today at 1:16 PM
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today at 3:16 PM
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today at 4:52 PM
> While they may be known across the world as âFrench friesâ, thereâs nothing French about them. The name âfrietâ comes from patates frites, Belgian-French for âfried potatoesâ. One possible explanation for the association could have been formed in the First World War, when American soldiers were introduced to âfried potatoesâ in Belgium, but thought they were in France because that was the language spoken in that region. Whether you call them Flemish or Belgian, our delicious fries are made from bintje potatoes per tradition, and are the tastiest youâll find anywhere on the planet.
Source: https://www.visitflanders.com/en/discover-flanders/culinary-...
today at 6:43 PM
Honestly, if you ever come to Cyprus and get good fries from the potatoes here, freshly cut and friedâŠ
The Belgian fries have no leg to stand on, nothing. Sorry. Just my opinion :) but Iâve been a life long fries lover from Germany - and these beat out all other fries I had so far in Europe at least by a wide margin :P
I know it wasnât your article but I wanted to spread this important knowledge to the world!!
today at 12:37 PM
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today at 7:27 PM
Gilfoyle again?
today at 12:45 PM
There is so much needless connection to the internet nowadays; this is the end result of a decade of shoving IoT into everything.
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
today at 12:58 PM
There are a bunch of good reasons to connect a commercial refrigeration unit to the Internet (via IoT). Notification when failover to the secondary cooling system happens, notification of when ambient temperature is too high, optimisation of energy consumption (especially after hours).
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
today at 1:16 PM
I didn't expect to spend so much time today thinking about fridges. I have so many questions. If it's all so connected and monitored and notifies of issues, couldn't it notify anyone that the settings are weird, like continuous 50 degree Celsius defrosting? How much access did the hackers have, apart from temperature controls? Could nobody intervene quickly before the damage was done? Was there a way to "unplug" the fridges or they would just keep frying, so they had to get people across all the stores doing manual resets?
today at 1:35 PM
It can do all that IF YOU THINK OF IT and then write the program to do it. If you think of it - which is unlikely because it never happened before (or perhaps it did before but electronics are reliable and so you think it won't ever again).
These are commercial units. There is no plug. There is a circuit breaker in the back room, but general rules is only an electrician is allowed to touch them: if they are off there is always a good reason (until now) and so random staffers touching the panel to turn a breaker on is likely to kill somebody.
today at 1:41 PM
Look for "Danfoss AK-SM 720 user manual" and scroll through the pdf.
You'll find that these are quite complex control systems and their data may not be integrated into an operational or security control centre. So if they are not configured for, or resourced (in terms of operators), to handle anomalies, how do they notice and respond?
Without knowing anything about the attack it may be that the controllers were not connected directly to the public Internet, but an on-site VPN that became compromised some other way. Or with a compromised laptop of a technician that connected.
So while you are thinking about fridges today, think about how you would secure and operate control systems across tens of thousands of stores. Would that be easier without Internet connectivity? How do you get qualified and experienced technicians into each (air gapped) store? Another complexity is that many of these systems are part of facilities management systems (HVAC, lighting, security, fire control) and managed or owned by a completely different organisation that is not going to share their data.
today at 5:05 PM
today at 1:16 PM
I always feel like such a buzzkill and Luddite when talking about IoT. My sister-in-law excitedly told me how her air fryer can be controlled remotely via an app. I think she also expected me â a techie â to be excited, but all I could see was unnecessary risk and usage data being slurped up by a corporation. I'm sure there are lots of good applications of IoT; however, I don't think this is one of them.
today at 4:17 PM
And your SIL would just be as likely excited too about a MOEN wifi connected voice controlled kitchen faucet. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the water bill comes and cannot pin point where the additional water they claim to have not used has gone.
Then we move on to even more serious potential life changing appliances that are wifi connected of which your SIL would certainly just be as excited about. Wifi connected hot water tanks of which some here know how they work and what this remote ability allows. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the medical bills come nor every single passing day when she sees the visible scars she must carry for the remainder of her living days for being 'cool' - ironic huh?
Reality hits hard as most humans are reactive and those that have been in this game for many decades grossly understand the dark side of insecurely connecting devices that have life changing implications. Medical devices companies have already shadowed their software mistakes yet such information only stays in the shadows for so long.
"What you cannot see matters most!" and many tech illiterates are currently learning this in most unfortunate ways. Some of that learning will scar both mentally and physically for life. Ain't it cool!
Many people here reading this are a lot smarter than I and such can therefore extrapolate and add to what is unfolding in the world. It shows little sign of stopping as more and more devices are connected daily under the guise of 'easy'.
Thus the underlying absolute reason to "Stay Healthy!"
today at 1:15 PM
Added to it that those devices are powered by firmware written in C and C++, with various levels of quality control if any, and no field updates.
today at 1:11 PM
> there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. Itâs not a consumer refrigerator, itâs 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.
today at 1:50 PM
> 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.
today at 4:55 PM
These incidents will bring back the appeal for dumb appliances, hopefully.
today at 5:45 PM
There's a marketing issue here that would need to be addressed first, namely the phrase "dumb appliance". That's a marketing slur that was intentionally propagated by manufacturers and it's bullshit. Few things seem more obviously stupid than the added complexity, expense, and security concerns associated with "smart appliances" especially given none of the features touted are critical to the appliance performing it's stated function.
today at 4:31 PM
Instead of climate change, let's call it "cyber change"...the rise of hacks of all kinds facilitated by AI