Why don't they just--- no margin. But there were CVEs-- no margin.

The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class has nothing in terms of luxuries like security reviews and gear replaced on cycles and other basics taken for granted.

But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?

Secure-by-default laws will eventually help, but there's always going to be groaning infrastructure particularly in commodity industries, and we still haven't onboarded most of the disaffected men to the Internet that will commit innumerable more hacks and disruptions.

(I 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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.lefroid.fr/fr/c/p/402785

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.

https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...

I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)

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.

I feel like this is kind of holding the supermarket hostage and saying, “Sure your freezer is working fine, but if you refuse to buy new freezers from us prepare to get hacked.”

Sure you can argue that the supermarket should have just taken the old freezers offline. But you can also argue that the manufacturer could have supplied software updates but didn’t in order to force sales of newer models.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506

why not put them behind corporate VPN of some kind?

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079

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.

Um, if everyone needlesly suffered, we'd not have the problem.

Whereas we have in fact generously provided life-enrichment opportunities - to miscreants.

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.

Now, is it connected to the internet? Ha ha ha, no.

* Food Lion, 1100 stores

* Stop & Shop, 400 stores

* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores

* Hannaford, ~160 stores

Websites are down at the very least. May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery. Mobile apps are down. “In-app coupon” redemption is likely down.

US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.

Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players

Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case

IOT security needs to change.

There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.

They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.

For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.

> The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered “in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS,” referring to battery management systems.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-warns-hidden-rad...

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.

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...

https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...

Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.

Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.

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.

andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...

Maybe they shouldn't.

You actually do want to be able to monitor them remotely, like most industrial/commercial refrigeration, to detect failures faster and more reliably. They should still be at least secured with normal auth/autz in addition to perimeter security, though.

If I can know when a fridge failed within the hour (even at night) then I can also dispatch a technician same/next day more easily.

Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.

- The device’s control has a radio transmitter that emits its readings, but no receiver. Listen for those messages to monitor it but there’s not a physical path to reply to it.

- The device’s controller writes a database or message queue. Its code never reads from that source. Monitors listen to those messages.

And many, many similar methods with the same core concept: the item transmits its status but doesn’t have a method to receive replies. You just have to commit to using any one of those thousands of mechanisms.

Read-only is a strong control with lots of solid implementations.

But to address your specific point:

being able to monitor does not ( or at least should not ) automatically equal put it on the web

Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.

This line suggests the units themselves were targeted individually with a hack:

> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.

But the problem with networked devices spread across tens of thousands of pretty much unguarded locations, surrounded by unvetted employees, but taking orders form a central location is that there is no such thing as "not online". They'll talk to the management server used to set up the nightly defrost schedules across the fleet. Even if they are in an isolated VLAN, it's always one step away from someone connecting a Pi to that network and off they go online. There's only so much zero-trust, NAC/802.1x and segmentation can do when some devices will be too old to support these and their network will be the entry point to the management server, then to the whole fleet.

I'm honestly very surprised that a couple of things things haven't happened yet: the central server for managing these fleets getting hacked and allowing access to the entire fleet, and/or the companies realizing that the only way to limit the reach of an attack is to physically not have the hardware needed to do remote control.

In my world the central server can be hack in two ways, that is by a malicious operator or via some scheme like the US/Israeli attack on Irans uranium centrifuges. The central server also have no business being online, that to is on a closed network, running the whitelisted applications from the manufacturer.

As long a schedule is conceived in one place and applied in another, even with human intervention on both sides, either one of the sides can be swindled. At this point with the bar for a successful hack being lower than ever, completely removing the hardware necessary to make remote changes is probably the only way to limit the blast radius.

Maybe allowing to send the schedule but requiring a local employee to operate a local hardware only control to apply it could work, but who has the money for this kind of complexity. Something like this on every freezer (device, really) in a fleet probably costs multiples of the money they lost with the spoiled food.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522

Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.

More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:

I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.

In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.

Which is how they got into this situation. These are industrial refrigeration systems subject to a huge list of variables (how many units, their sizes, and doors hooked up to a refrigeration circuit, open vs closed cases, ambient conditions, hours of store operation, what type of refrigerant, whether heat is going to a cooling tower or air heat exchanger). They use a ton of energy, and percent optimization leads to millions of dollars over a fleet. They are designed to let the user dial in every operating parameter, like defrost.

Compare this to my home fridge where all these parameters are fixed in the firmware because the hardware is 100% identical.

Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.

Honestly, reality begs to differ.

This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.

Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to connect any home appliances to the Internet. I have a limited number of Zigbee devices, and they are managed through Home Assistant and can't access the Internet.

Then again when was the last time you opened your freezer hundreds of times during one day, letting humid air in and building ice at an accelerated rate? These units actively heat up the back of the freezer (evaporator plate) nightly to quickly melt the ice without warming up the food.

There is no reason to directly trigger it remotely but they probably work on a customizable schedule, to account for different store opening times, timezones, or freezer size and model. The hackers could target that schedule to make the defrost last longer.

Within a store certain freezers get more traffic than others, depending on how they're stocked, where they're located, etc, and therefore likely require more frequent defrosting. But that's something the store managers can figure out. It doesn't need to be managed remotely by some third party. So why did someone engineer that capability?

More features, generally, means more failure modes. More ways to exploit the system. Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion. It's very unhealthy and disordered behavior from an engineering standpoint--sacrificing reliability and simplicity for... what exactly? Some centralized control capability? But why?

> Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?

The purpose of the automation is the same as always, to run at peak effectiveness and reduce human error. Most of the workers in this industry much like the fast food one, are low paid, low skill, receiving only basic training, with a high turnover rate, across tens of thousands of locations from major cities to somewhere in the sticks. Even a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage that's only obvious too late. So this extra work is taken out of their hands. You should really see a lot of the machines the big fast food chains use, you'd be amazed.

This kind of decision was never left to the store manager. In the past they'd get a printout and probably fail to follow the instructions occasionally, which may or may not cause damage or increases operating costs across the entire fleet. Now it's done over the network like everything else, for better or worse.

> Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion.

> More features, generally, means more failure modes.

Here's the kicker, they are necessary and desired by the customer and the failure scenarios were almost definitely factored into their calculations. I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.

And normally I'd agree (more) with you but the small scale of the hack makes me think they've done a decent job at securing them so far. Spending more on people and security to avoid any hack (right?), or losing efficiency over tens of thousands of locations costs more than the spoiled food.

There isn't a complex real time control scenario here.. Obviously defrosting too much wastes energy, so you'll want to get that one right. But does having centralized control over that really make a difference at scale? Does having centralized control over temperature set-point make any difference?

From the basic physics of the process it's hard to imagine real time remote control being a decisive factor in efficiency.

> I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.

I mean.. maybe? But nothing you wrote actually demonstrates that.

[edit] I guess if it's not about efficiency but instead a trust issue then it makes more sense from a marketing standpoint. But generally remote control isn't a great way to work around untrusted operators with physical access. They could just prop a door open or slice the seal if they wanted to..

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.

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.

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...

I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?

On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).

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".

I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)

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(temp > 5) return;

My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just can’t help themselves apparently.

Why, so you can turn it on from your smartphone when you're out of town, of course!

"Well, I can't help you there, but I can turn off the fume hood from my phone!"

"..."

But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.

Can you turn that off or do you just have to put up with the noise?

Of course we can control it, it's all wired up via Home Assistant.

We specifically want to prevent scenarios like: you take a leak, the leak turns into a shitting session or a phone call, you forgot you left the burner on.

2. Most of the time my wife and I make food together so if one person needs to take a leak the other one is around anyway.

3. For long slow cooking, we have plenty of comfy seating in the kitchen/dining area where we can get work done while being in sight of pots.

4. We have 2 pets we'd need to locate in an emergency, and so we tend to put electrical and fire safety higher than most people.

To boot, refrigeration has been wholly automatic for decades. It literally runs itself. It doesn't need any network connectivity other than to say "I work" and "I'm broken" and that's it. Allowing control commands to be sent over the network is, yet again, just asking for trouble.

It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.

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.

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.

A) Lots of Russians died during WW2, it wasn’t “evil Russia sends troops from occupied republics to fight for them while Russians sit back”.

B) Lots of mercenaries from post-Soviet republics fight for money on Russias side now

C) Russia didn’t pull out because they’ve run out of men. Where did you get this?

I wonder where then the millions of soldiers that fought the russian civil war came from.

And the might of the US/UK/etc are a hundred times stronger than the Taliban in Afghanistan, however who ended up winning that war? Or how about Vietnam?

My point being: the size/capability of a military doesn't necessarily result in a win. I think NATO forces have a particular problem of being pretty unmotivated about Ukraine winning.

Conventional military powers sure seem like they were overrated.

Now Russia is one of only two players with years of experience in the latest generation of warfare, while NATO is still stuck in the 20th century.

I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.

GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.

You're assuming rational behavior, but time and time again world leaders have demonstrated that they will pursue erratic behavior if their feelings or vibe suggest them that behavior to be their way out of their own trouble.

Russia doesn’t need direct attack on NATO to intimidate, or even destroy the alliance. And even if it did attack NATO member, it is going to be guess what? A discussion. Just like what they have right now. It’s not going to be DEFCON style theatrical attack from the united West on Russia. You know what happens during WW2? When Russia and Germany carved up Poland? Nothing happened when France declared war on Germany. There was a period of 8 months where they just stared at each other. It was called “Phoney war”. Chances are we might witness Russia just steam rolling Baltics while the West talks between each other what to do next.

So the current incident was a preemptive alert by Brussels.

They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw0k0g57mk3zo

So a lot of their territorial loss can be attributed to his inaction. If they'd laid several million landmines in the Donbass the Russian attack would've been stumped and the occupied Crimea would've been easy prey.

If you mobilize your armed forces and move all your soldiers to the border and dig them in you'll dissuade an attacker from invading.

It used to be much more true. The Biden admin sent a lot more US weapons to fight Russia, Trump used to be much more amenable to send similar weapons provided somebody paid for it.

Nowadays US materiel is either tied up in the middle east or somewhere else (Patriots), or has been neutralized by Russian EW (HIMARS), or the US is just unwilling to part with it for whatever justification.

Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.

A single Tomahawk missile could obliterate Moscow which would immediately end the war because Russia is extremely centralized. It's the reason almost 80% of all Russian SAM capability is stationed around the city.

Putin is unpredictable but he's not stupid. You don't become president of Russia by being stupid.

Do you even know how big Moscow is? And nuclear Tomahawks were discontinued. Even if they weren’t, you’d need dozens to obliterate Moscow.

Who attacked Ukraine, again?

I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).

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".

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.

  > The war logically follows from Russia’s security goals.

According to Kozyrev, instead of a patchwork of dysfunctional countries at war with each other like in the former Yugoslavia (with overspilling effects on Russia), EU and NATO integration helped build modern, peaceful and predictable countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which in practical terms meant "free-of-charge security" (his term) for Russia. What's there to complain about?

Furthermore, Mearsheimer et al treat countries as monoliths and completely ignore the competing interests of groups and individuals within them. Russia of the early 1990s was a flawed democracy; today it is a totalitarian dictatorship. The war against Ukraine is a downstream effect of the destruction of Russian democracy and consolidation of absolute power into the hands of Putin's security apparatus gang. Putin wants to be remembered as a "great ruler" and that's all there is to it; a small man who managed to gain absolute power, no different from Hitler.

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.

They can't take Kiev but they're threatening Paris.

By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.

What could possibly go wrong?

The grid could stabilize as a side effect. And the cars are already connected to the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming

"Hey, maybe we shouldn't send men over the top only to die in a barrage of machine gun fire..."

"That's just victim blaming--it isn't our behavior that needs to change; it is the enemy's behavior that needs to change."

Victim-blaming is another term that is apparently becoming a meaningless vibe.

It sounds like you think victims are necessarily blameless.

In my experience, new cars have new car problems, but old cars have old car problems.

There’s no clear winner in every metric, just trade offs.

> 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)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duns_Scotus

Lots of industrial controls haven’t been updated since they were deployed in the 90’s. “And why should they be? If it ain’t broken…” Well, because they’re freaking broken!

So I’m glad that this happened in a tangible, public way people can easily understand without it involving something much more drastic. If your family asks about this, explain that you’re glad no one blew up a gas pipeline… yet.

Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most. There have been numerous examples of lax security in this area already and a fleet of rogue cars or delivery trucks could obviously cause huge amounts of damage, injury, and loss of life.

There's a legacy of openness in car tech and software that was never designed with robust security and isolation of critical components in mind. I've heard that this has started to change more recently and that's reassuring if true. But this still feels like an area with far too little regulation or oversight given the past choices of vehicle manufacturers and far too much rush to connect everything up remotely even for minor convenience reasons.

In some cases there also now seems to be legally mandated connectivity for things like automated emergency calls after an accident. This should at least have a genuine benefit in the unfortunate situation that it's needed - but until vehicle security looks more like Fort Knox than a sandcastle it might still prove to be a bad choice in the end.

Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. Find the cellular modem fuse and pull it. You now have a modern, but fully offline car. Security aside, connected cars are absolutely awful for your privacy.

The "straightforward" solution is to tell vehicle manufacturers that they aren't allowed to sell vehicles with connectivity unless they also have proper security and privacy protections in place. If no-one can give them money for it then they won't do it.

> Our research uncovered a hidden "code-of-the-day" authentication mechanism that could be abused to bypass normal authentication

> Our analysis began by examining the internet exposure of these devices, where we identified thousands of publicly accessible management interfaces

> (shell injection vulnerability in management interface)

This is how we used to vibe-code before we had LLMs.

On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.

I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).

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.

It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control; a supermarket is a place where there are always people, it's not a base on Mars. And even if a remote is needed, it should probably not go further than the manager's office.

I don’t know to what degree control is needed, but remote supervision of cold holding temperatures is good to make sure food doesn’t spoil. Most places that don’t have networked fridges have staff manually logging the cold holding temperatures to make sure things are working.

Again, though, I don’t know about making changes though.

The other, more likely, answer is that there’s a diagnostic mode that allows raw control of the system and no one bothered to require physical presence to enable service mode.

With remote firmware update capability, at attacker could easily brick the entire fleet. With just service access it could be possible but would be more complex.

Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.

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.

Probably to inflict pain on the life of the voters so they can blame the government and manipulate the 2027 French presidential election in April. Maybe just a test.

Same as the high velocity train being sabotaged again just in the Spain national day. Hybrid war.

In France this benefits the pro-Russian Lepen's party with the "government is a disaster but we will make them pay for your suffering". Page "16" of the manual. In the end is all the same handbook all around the planet.

Just by the record, EU has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia so yes, they know. The more desperate grows Russia, the more this will happen. Until it will stop, suddenly, for no reason.

> 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.

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.

But the hack has already been disclosed and it's the responsability of the manufacturer to ensure that the fridge keep ever up to date or offline.

As with the USA Defense hack, it could have been prevented.

The hack: https://blog.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controll...

I can't for the life of me understand why these systems aren't air gapped, or at the very least network access is restricted to a small number of IPs or hardware keys.

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.

They use cold cases and have rooftop or outdoor condensing units and evaporators inside of the cold cases/freezers/etc. There’s refrigerant piping running all over the place and there’s a bunch of sensors and relays that are automated to manage the refrigeration system.

My assumption is the Danfoss control system they’re using is EOL, it’s the grocer’s responsibility to upgrade their automation equipment if it’s unsupported.

> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates". It said its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 fridge regulator systems were notably affected, with a version of the former using "outdated firmware". It added that it had long advised supermarkets to update from those models.

That being said I am curious what is typically the amount of time for software support offered on a newly released equipment and how common it is for super market to use obsolete software (especially for the part which carry some security risk like something with remote control). Also what about the insurance? Will they (fully) cover the financial loss? I don't know what is in their insurance contract and I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that using obsolete software make the supermarket responsible to some extent

It's a near guarantee. I've been in dozens of power plants where the engineering workstations or operator interface terminals are running Windows XP or Windows 7. More than zero of which were not properly air-gapped. If those sites (with sizable CapEx budgets) delay upgrading for various reasons I would expect grocery store chains to keep whatever they have running until it's broken to the point of not being fixable without a complete overhaul.

https://www.danfoss.com/en/industries/food-and-beverage/dcs/...

Dispatch an HVAC tech if an alarm comes up. Physical access should be the only way to shut down a system like this.

Your opinion does not change the fact that virtually every automation system can be access remotely. It can be done safely with proper access controls.

gestures broadly

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.

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 ;)

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).

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

With floor planning, the loss itself could be spread across multiple companies, under multiple insurance policies.

With that said, this particular hack could easily be a systems / networking "configuration error" and not any particular piece of softwares fault ( as in a bug, or hardcoded backdoor password. )

The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.

I happen to have a Danfoss HVAC controller here, and its controllable via Modbus. Its an older model, but its my understanding that larger HVAC systems commonly use Modbus.

Modbus systems are multi-drop serial, and the hack likely came in from the server side of one of the companies involved, and the HVAC controllers were all sent defrost commands. Thats my guess anyway.

I have a pump thats Modbus controllable as well, made by a company called Grundfos.

Gonna make a water battery.

Shift my cooling load into off-peak rate hours.

Stickin it to the power man. :D

Seriously, you guys would love these pumps.

https://product-selection.grundfos.com/us/products/magna-nor...

It has wifi. Neighbor kids are gonna defrost me. :(

I'm in the beginning stages of giving my home HVAC system an upgrade and using Modbus throughout with various adapter boards.

https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...

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.

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.

Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.

How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.

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.

* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.

Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.

I doubt the fridge has a remote-controlled robot arm to unload itself.

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.

Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.

Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.

These are minimum wage workers - they don't have bean bags in the nap room, employee massages and stock options.

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.

Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.

There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.

I shouldn’t need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.

The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.

The Belgian fries have no leg to stand on, nothing. Sorry. Just my opinion :) but I’ve 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 wasn’t your article but I wanted to spread this important knowledge to the world!!

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.

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!"

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.