Posted by Zeekaas 9 hours ago
Related:
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
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.
Lots of completely out of touch comments
(I can see the need for remote monitoring, that the freezer actually worked. Controlling the temperature is the issue.)
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.
What these idiots just don't grok is that there's no margin for that stuff. Sure, sometimes people say things like "if you can't buy a truck that keeps workers safe and still make a profit, perhaps you don't have a viable business" but that's just crazy talk. What's important is that things are made cheaply so that our margin can be preserved.
Security isn't optional just because margins are low. If eg FedEx decided to disregard security because they only made 3% of the value of the packages they ship in profit, they'd lose most of that business fast. But yes, let's not shame folks for failing to preempt theoretical-yet-unseen threats, if that's what you mean.
At least that's what I got from it.
Maybe it's even honestly not related to the attack.
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.
It is absurdly tragic/hilarious that the lowest margin business in all of capitalism is the one that the communists have set their sights on as being a central site of oppression.
It seems that some of the newer lab machines require internet access because you can't run lab tests unless you have a paid subscription to use the machine. No credits on the subscription, no tests.
I mention this b/c a lot of commenters here are saying "but why would you ever hook up a freezer to the internet??"
I find that type of comment fascinating as many of the people on HN worked for firms that built the technology required to use internet based subscription models.
Of course, the reality is more likely that the hospital still has to buy things and the subscription is a net loss on top of that so patients (or the people paying for the care) are screwed twice.
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
maybe groups have been looking for targets to use it on?
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".
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.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.
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.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.
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.
If only…
Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
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.
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.
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/fix-and-troub...
They highlight connection through a firewall, mention secure remote access methods, monitoring for data breaches, strong access controls, etc. Reasonable, but these are just recommendations, so the stores could have followed all of them or none at all.
An article about Danfoss vulnerabilities mentioned in a different comment (https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...) says
> we searched publicly available internet-wide scanning platforms, including Shodan and Censys, for signatures associated with its management interface. It didn't take long to find what we were looking for. Numerous controllers [2765] were directly accessible from the public Internet.
So none at all is a possibility.
... And then the customer demands it be turned off, and the customer is always right...
Though I'm afraid things are getting worse, or at least it looked so a few years ago, back when I worked in this space. The hot thing in IIoT / Industry 4.0 was basically taking all webshit technologies and deploying them on industrial hardware, to "leverage mature innovation and OSS ecosystem" or such nonsense. The problem (one of many) being, once the engineers were done trimming excessive security measures that negatively impacted safety, they were still left with node.js running on industrial controllers, now even less secure in general than it was originally.
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.
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)
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?
Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.
If you home refrigerator could be defrosted remotely, in what scenario would you ever do that?
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?
Russia's idea of hybrid warfare means doing things like dragging anchors across internet cables and paying people to firebomb warehouses and businesses.
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.
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.
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
You can't drive my car simply by pointing a webcam on the steering wheel.
My position is that if there's any connection, of any practical type, between the control system and the outside world, an attacker will be able to find ways to break things.
Even if it just boils down to "an attacker made our dashboards report numbers wrong and so we closed a valve to prevent an issue that didn't exist, and inadvertently destroyed our own product", the outcome is the same.
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.
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.
It’s a very low margin business if you don’t work efficiently you’ll get outcompeted by people who do like Aldi/ Trader Joe’s etc
Most of the HVAC based control system changes are about saving energy, not labor.
or find any exposed Ethernet slot and slide your device in it.
most of the time it will work and you will get an inside access.
publicly available retail stores require multiple layers of defense across the L7 stack
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
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.
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.
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.
- 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...
https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around €7,000 [1]. So this is hardly the typical dirt-cheap IoT device you can buy for a few bucks from China. The product label also says "Made in Denmark."
This vulnerability certainly appears more complex to exploit than the ones routinely found in cheap IoT devices.
Still, I wonder why, in the age of Tailscale and Nebula, a large company like Danfoss doesn’t use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
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.
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.