Chains in Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg say fridge temperatures rose overnight, similar to hack of French stores
Supermarket chains in Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg have said the temperatures of their refrigerators and freezers in dozens of stores rose overnight, prompting fears of a cyber-attack similar to one that caused millions of euros of food losses in France.
Sweden’s Coop chain told the daily Aftonbladet on Monday that six of its stores had been affected, while ICA said it was “aware that a limited number of stores were affected by an incident overnight which impacted their refrigeration and freezer systems”.
Maybe we should stop putting appliances on wifi? Like, for everyone everywhere?
They had their warning from similar attacks a few weeks ago. Whoever was stupid enough not to pull the plug on this interface deserves the losses. From the costs for the freezer contents, they could have hired even a pricy security specialist.
OP’s name checks out.
Boy this is hard to understand.
The first and foremost sign of intelligence is the ability to learn. Somehow, those supermarket owners seem to lack this important trait.
IT Security sits in cost center side of the business for these Legacy companies.
It’s very much a " everything is fine why do we pay you?" Or everything is broken why do we pay you?" Situation
Stop connecting shit to the internet, this is not a difficult problem to fix.
I was gonna argue that a local remote control alternative doesn’t exist, but I really don’t know why you’d need freezers to be remotely controlled. They’re more of a set and forget.
Walmart had that since the early 2000’s. Fucking bullshit then too. We once had a section go out and called corporate and they argued it was working because their computer said so. Fucking dumb asses we are looking at it and some asshat in Arkansas (we are in Texas) tells us we are wrong. They finally agreed to send a rep from headquarters to drive down and look for himself (who knows cost of that) just for that guy to go "yall right it broke. " Then.we got local guy come fix it.
But god forbid someone take a package of baby formula
YTF does a refrigerator need to be on net control??? Isn’t it a set once and forget it device? Maybe to monitor it to report a failure… but to CONTROL it???
It’s more convenient for the hackers this way, duh
it’s so they can sell subscriptions to the cloud bullshit.
Stop fucking connecting everything to the stupid internet. Everything should be offline first.
The current way is if it can be connected to the internet, that must be done, it must be an advantage. Ditto with AI. People need to chill and realize that not everything benefits from this shit and sometimes you even worsen the product/service ffs. Just stop!
👏Stop 👏 making 👏 everything 👏 connect 👏 to 👏 the 👏 internet👏
Why these on network with outside access?
Because stupid. There’s zero reason for them to be on the public internet beyond incompetent operational IT security.
In theory they gather all sorts of data so they can see how efficiently they’re running, whether maintenance is needed. If something goes wrong with one of the units they can dispatch a repair guy immediately, or have the store shift the food before any spoilage. If they’re smart about it they can use the data to set up an efficient preventative maintenance schedule and really stay on top of things.
A chain that has 500 stores with 20 units a piece adds up fast. They probably have a person at headquarters whose only job it is to stay on top of these units.
Exactly ; the concept itself is the real flaw.
So, is it still the outdated firmware they’ve been warned about and asked to update?
In the first round of attacks the password was apparently today’s date. Updated firmware won’t protect them from policies like that.
The question isn’t so much, “Why were these on the internet?”, so much as, “Why were these not securely connected?”
At my last job, our AWS resources were firewalled off, only accepting connections from our internal VPN. To get on that, you had to be coming from the IP of an office or a DevOps team member’s home IP.
The local firewalls could have only allowed traffic to the freezer VLAN from the remote monitoring IP.
And that’s just two ideas off the top of my head. If my dumbass can do it, you don’t need a high level networking expert to fix this.
I work as an IT consultant, and this doesn’t surprise in the least. Non-tech companies tend to have terrible security posture and governance. It seems like they only implement a basic security posture if they have to by law or they got hacked and lost a lot of money. I think the unintended consequences of this hacks are actually helping supermarkets to get their shit together in cyber security
Yep! But this was the second such attack. I get being stupid the first time around, totally understandable.
imagine having a freezer that’s susceptible to a cyber attack. Why the fuck is it connected to the internet? All it needs is a thermostat. The closest thing to a “smart feature” that might benefit is the ability to send a notification if power fails or temperature falls below a set value, neither of which should be hackable by an outside party.
Right!? Haven’t we had these solutions for commercial fridges/freezers for quite a while now? Why on earth did we bring the internet into it? 😅
We bought a new Liebherr refrigerator, without a water connection and more importantly, no Wi-Fi connection.
