> Connecting your case controller to the internet offers further opportunities to generate savings. If you can diagnose issues and control the case remotely, service engineers needn’t be called out to simple situations like starting a defrost. And being able to compare performance and efficiency across an entire estate of stores makes it easy to spot patterns and make incremental efficiency gains. (https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/articles/dcs/...)
I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".
Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming our for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
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.
Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet.
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
Russia cannot invade Europe, that is nonsense peddled by the EU establishment to support their idiotic military Keynesianism as part of a plan to reboot EU manufacturing.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
Large scale invasion is not likely, but they could try some limited operation to test NATO's unity. Most likely location would be somewhere in the Baltics.
To be fair, that they are struggling to take over a couple of villages in Ukraine is in large parts due to the intensified arms and ammunition production of the entire EU (and in the past that of the US). And that's only enough for a standstill
Ukraine did a spectacular job to stop the full-scale invasion in the initial hours, days and weeks when there wasn't much international help yet though (and I guess from that moment on the war didn't go quite according to plan from the Russian PoV).
Standstill with Ukraine looks bad, and authoritarian regimes can survive almost anything except looking bad.
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
Not Europe but a few Baltic states are feasible. No one says they can hold it, but Putin has his own reasons so we should not think we can conclude on future Russian actions based on what we consider reasonable - e.g. no one predicted that a war on Ukraine was likely as it seemed to be completely irrational and self-defeating.
If nothing else, war has been many times convenient to keep regimes in power (see Bush post 9/11 for an obvious example). Putin might want to strengthen his case. See absurd discussions / push for a "Republic of Narva" as an example cause belli.
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
What regulations would help with this? companies that actually host the models themselves can be regulated but open models can e abliterated or otherwise modified to stop them from refusing tasks. I'd be very wary of any regulations that prevent people from hosting or making their own models and weights.
It's probably a small drop compared to the overall amounts of wasted food. I guess the hope is that it will teach some people important lessons, like "your refrigerator shouldn't be connected to the Internet, and if it absolutely has to, take some time to consider security".
There is so much needless connection to the internet nowadays; this is the end result of a decade of shoving IoT into everything.
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
There are a bunch of good reasons to connect a commercial refrigeration unit to the Internet (via IoT). Notification when failover to the secondary cooling system happens, notification of when ambient temperature is too high, optimisation of energy consumption (especially after hours).
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
I didn't expect to spend so much time today thinking about fridges.
I have so many questions. If it's all so connected and monitored and notifies of issues, couldn't it notify anyone that the settings are weird, like continuous 50 degree Celsius defrosting? How much access did the hackers have, apart from temperature controls? Could nobody intervene quickly before the damage was done? Was there a way to "unplug" the fridges or they would just keep frying, so they had to get people across all the stores doing manual resets?
I always feel like such a buzzkill and Luddite when talking about IoT. My sister-in-law excitedly told me how her air fryer can be controlled remotely via an app. I think she also expected me — a techie — to be excited, but all I could see was unnecessary risk and usage data being slurped up by a corporation. I'm sure there are lots of good applications of IoT; however, I don't think this is one of them.
> there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
My guess, its a service contractor type situation, like getting a smart meter. You can opt out, you just wont have power.
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Somebody wrote the software that is the interface between the fridge and the internet. And while it would be nice if HVAC technicians would remember to only make this software accessible via VPN, it is in fact possible to write software that is reachable from the internet while still being secure
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
IoT platforms provided all the required functionality. Device provisioning (it is not easy to do identity on 'things'). MQTT for service-assisted communication where devices don't need to accept incoming connections. Over-the-air software updates. Over-the-air kernel security updates.
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
Of course its "possible" for it to be secure, but the people involved are not experts.
The grocer likely has the least expertise.
The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
3 of the 4 companies could have all said to themselves "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws ? The grocer(s).
Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
Yes, not exactly "unprecedented." The news of Commissaries having their freezers hacked should have been a kick in the rump for everyone else with infrastructure needlessly connected to the Internet.
> Connecting your case controller to the internet offers further opportunities to generate savings. If you can diagnose issues and control the case remotely, service engineers needn’t be called out to simple situations like starting a defrost. And being able to compare performance and efficiency across an entire estate of stores makes it easy to spot patterns and make incremental efficiency gains. (https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/articles/dcs/...)
I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".
Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming our for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
Good find.
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
I would have said let them be doomed. But due to late stage capitalism so much has been centralized that everybody is doomed in many cases...
Thankfully these kind of attacks make pressure to finally have liability in software like in other industries.
And I would bet dollars to donuts that someone at that company would respond "who's going to hack a refrigerator? Heh"
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.
Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet.
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
An apt time to revisit this gem...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4192998/
Russia cannot invade Europe, that is nonsense peddled by the EU establishment to support their idiotic military Keynesianism as part of a plan to reboot EU manufacturing.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
Large scale invasion is not likely, but they could try some limited operation to test NATO's unity. Most likely location would be somewhere in the Baltics.
To be fair, that they are struggling to take over a couple of villages in Ukraine is in large parts due to the intensified arms and ammunition production of the entire EU (and in the past that of the US). And that's only enough for a standstill
Ukraine did a spectacular job to stop the full-scale invasion in the initial hours, days and weeks when there wasn't much international help yet though (and I guess from that moment on the war didn't go quite according to plan from the Russian PoV).
Standstill with Ukraine looks bad, and authoritarian regimes can survive almost anything except looking bad.
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
Not Europe but a few Baltic states are feasible. No one says they can hold it, but Putin has his own reasons so we should not think we can conclude on future Russian actions based on what we consider reasonable - e.g. no one predicted that a war on Ukraine was likely as it seemed to be completely irrational and self-defeating.
If nothing else, war has been many times convenient to keep regimes in power (see Bush post 9/11 for an obvious example). Putin might want to strengthen his case. See absurd discussions / push for a "Republic of Narva" as an example cause belli.
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
My first idea was "who the hell needs connected fridges".
Then I remembered that both my AC and floor heating are connected.
A hacker could easily turn on both AC and floor heating and cause me a few euros of damages in my electricity bill.
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
And hopefully regulation following it.
What regulations would help with this? companies that actually host the models themselves can be regulated but open models can e abliterated or otherwise modified to stop them from refusing tasks. I'd be very wary of any regulations that prevent people from hosting or making their own models and weights.
Great. We already waste a ton of food, let’s destroy even more.
It's probably a small drop compared to the overall amounts of wasted food. I guess the hope is that it will teach some people important lessons, like "your refrigerator shouldn't be connected to the Internet, and if it absolutely has to, take some time to consider security".
these are the visible effects of a hybrid war, not the pranks of script kids
There is so much needless connection to the internet nowadays; this is the end result of a decade of shoving IoT into everything.
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
There are a bunch of good reasons to connect a commercial refrigeration unit to the Internet (via IoT). Notification when failover to the secondary cooling system happens, notification of when ambient temperature is too high, optimisation of energy consumption (especially after hours).
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
I didn't expect to spend so much time today thinking about fridges. I have so many questions. If it's all so connected and monitored and notifies of issues, couldn't it notify anyone that the settings are weird, like continuous 50 degree Celsius defrosting? How much access did the hackers have, apart from temperature controls? Could nobody intervene quickly before the damage was done? Was there a way to "unplug" the fridges or they would just keep frying, so they had to get people across all the stores doing manual resets?
I always feel like such a buzzkill and Luddite when talking about IoT. My sister-in-law excitedly told me how her air fryer can be controlled remotely via an app. I think she also expected me — a techie — to be excited, but all I could see was unnecessary risk and usage data being slurped up by a corporation. I'm sure there are lots of good applications of IoT; however, I don't think this is one of them.
Added to it that those devices are powered by firmware written in C and C++, with various levels of quality control if any, and no field updates.
> there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is hard.
Fridge attack! We live sci-fi indeed! %-)
Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
Of course the bigger question is why a refrigerator is even a "connected device".
Because it is cool! (pun intended)
For the same reason, we hardly have heating meters in Germany that aren't wireless connected to the maintenance company.
To save costs doing maintenance trips to check their state.
So they can monitor if something goes wrong, have a tech troubleshoot and deploy with the right parts.
Modern HVAC and fire control b systems for buildings are often connected now as well
Only three more Russian datacentres to go, and Belgians won’t be the only ones eating each other again this winter.
“Got another blackout in Santo Domingo. Netrunners are at it again, poking holes in the power grid!”
that's happened in Ukraine, a few times already — search for sandworm
andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...
Why is this even connected to the internet. If you want to monitor it remotely, you can set that independently from the actual controls.
Why is that even internet enabled?
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
My guess, its a service contractor type situation, like getting a smart meter. You can opt out, you just wont have power.
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Somebody wrote the software that is the interface between the fridge and the internet. And while it would be nice if HVAC technicians would remember to only make this software accessible via VPN, it is in fact possible to write software that is reachable from the internet while still being secure
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
IoT platforms provided all the required functionality. Device provisioning (it is not easy to do identity on 'things'). MQTT for service-assisted communication where devices don't need to accept incoming connections. Over-the-air software updates. Over-the-air kernel security updates.
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
Of course its "possible" for it to be secure, but the people involved are not experts.
The grocer likely has the least expertise. The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
contracted programmers <-> fridge equipment maker <-> HVAC sales/service group <-> grocer
3 of the 4 companies could have all said to themselves "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws ? The grocer(s).
Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible
someone, or something, needs to monitor the fridges remotely, which means networked thing with all the cute little details of the IOT tacked to it
edit: these are unlikely to be directly connected to the internet, but rather part of an internal network that got popped, likely a while a go too
Have you ever been to a grocery store?
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.
Wait until they figure out they’re all filled with butane as a refrigerant thanks to global warming.
well that will be explosive!
... Feels like deja vu. Didn't the US military just have this happen at its military exchanges... a month or two ago?
Yes, yes they did. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/...
"ALL freezers went into defrost mode – ALL frozen food has spoiled".
This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
Yeah I remember that, and it seems like the military was very hush-hush about the cause. Now I wonder if they were hacked too.
Yes, not exactly "unprecedented." The news of Commissaries having their freezers hacked should have been a kick in the rump for everyone else with infrastructure needlessly connected to the Internet.
the sort of people doing this security posture definitely are not up to date on the latest security news...
It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner to even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
TomsHardware hit? I'm getting spinning beachballs on this link
All Future sites are junk now, and I imagine even with subscription they aren't much better.
“Suck it, Jin-Yang!”