> 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 needn’t 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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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
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).
Let‘s 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 weren’t 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.
Standstill with Ukraine looks bad, and authoritarian regimes can survive almost anything except looking bad.
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
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.
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).
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.
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
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.
> A critical security flaw dubbed HomeHack exposed 1 million LG smartThinQ IoT home devices, enabling hackers to easily gain access to users’ homes and take full control over any LG smart device connected to the account, including dishwashers, vacuums, air conditioners and washing machines, found security researchers from Check Point.
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.
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 there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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...
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 — a techie — 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.
> there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is 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.
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.
> 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)...
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 ;)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
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".
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
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.
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?
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.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4192998/
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
You think about a frontal attack like in Ukraine, and maybe you're right. But Russia is already waging a much more subtle war against NATO. Look at who's leading the US. Look at Brexit. Or look at who could soon lead France or Germany... Their conventional army may be weak, but they don't need to fire a bullet either.
And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Their political influence, even with right-wing politicians who might be skewed their way, will be limited. And could change at any moment as we've seen with Orban.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
This is of course a stupid lie they are telling themselves. They've been invading Ukraine since 2014. They had the option of being good international citizens, with an elite flying to the west and buying some football teams for their entertainment, but they chose not to do that.
> Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that.
Russia can retreat inside their internationally recognized borders at any time. The problem is they don't want to sue for peace because that would admit losing, and include losing illegally annexed territory. They've made no serious attempts at even starting negotiations with Europe, while escalating "hybrid warfare".
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw0k0g57mk3zo
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).
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.
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.
2014:
> A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets.
> The fridge was one of more than 100,000 devices used to take part in the spam campaign.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25780908
Lessons were not learned:
2017:
> A critical security flaw dubbed HomeHack exposed 1 million LG smartThinQ IoT home devices, enabling hackers to easily gain access to users’ homes and take full control over any LG smart device connected to the account, including dishwashers, vacuums, air conditioners and washing machines, found security researchers from Check Point.
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/securi...
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.
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
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.
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...
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
These are commercial units. There is no plug. There is a circuit breaker in the back room, but general rules is only an electrician is allowed to touch them: if they are off there is always a good reason (until now) and so random staffers touching the panel to turn a breaker on is likely to kill somebody.
You'll find that these are quite complex control systems and their data may not be integrated into an operational or security control centre. So if they are not configured for, or resourced (in terms of operators), to handle anomalies, how do they notice and respond?
Without knowing anything about the attack it may be that the controllers were not connected directly to the public Internet, but an on-site VPN that became compromised some other way. Or with a compromised laptop of a technician that connected.
So while you are thinking about fridges today, think about how you would secure and operate control systems across tens of thousands of stores. Would that be easier without Internet connectivity? How do you get qualified and experienced technicians into each (air gapped) store? Another complexity is that many of these systems are part of facilities management systems (HVAC, lighting, security, fire control) and managed or owned by a completely different organisation that is not going to share their data.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is hard.
Authentication is easy, getting people (esp. leadership) to give a shit is hard.
Control loop is obviously local and performed by dedicated controller hardware. If you only need remote monitoring then don't expose any management functionality.
If you want remote management, then define an envelope of allowable system parameters that can be controlled remotely. Allowing defrost to be initiated remotely has obvious risks and known solutions - add a hardware interlock, like a physical button or a key switch.
Even if you ignore all other precautions and allow all parameters to be controlled without limitations, strong authentication is still easy to implement, if anyone cares enough to do it.
andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...
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)...
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.
Modern HVAC and fire control b systems for buildings are often connected now as well
It also wouldn't be a big deal when a supermarket employee makes an old-fashioned phone call (gasp!) to the refrigerator service company when some red light starts blinking ;)
Yes, yes they did. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/...
"ALL freezers went into defrost mode – ALL frozen food has spoiled".
It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
The grocer likely has the least expertise. The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
contracted programmers <-> fridge equipment maker <-> HVAC sales/service group <-> grocer
3 of the 4 companies could have all said to themselves "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws ? The grocer(s).
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
I happen to have a Danfoss HVAC controller here, and its controllable via Modbus. Its an older model, but its my understanding that larger HVAC systems commonly use Modbus.
Modbus systems are multi-drop serial, and the hack likely came in from the server side of one of the companies involved, and the HVAC controllers were all sent defrost commands. Thats my guess anyway.
I have a pump thats Modbus controllable as well, made by a company called Grundfos.
Gonna make a water battery.
Shift my cooling load into off-peak rate hours.
Stickin it to the power man. :D
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...
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.
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
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.