I worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.
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.
There's huge difference between _sensors_ and _actuators_. You can put sensors online if you don't care too much about data leaking out. You put _actuators_ online... You need to be able to deal with the consequences.
How does this actually work, in practice? If you have read access to sensors, then there's a non-air-gapped network between the control systems and the internet.
If your network isn't air gapped, then it's vulnerable, and attackers will side step the "read only" path to write control system changes.
Supermarkets very efficiently drive down the cost of food so that food is abundant - basically everyone in developed counties has access to low cost food. Part of that process is not wasting overhead on having people manually checking various gauges.
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
Often attacks like this involve first getting on the VPN (leaked creds, a n-day on a web-accessible endpoint, etc) then running wild on the internal services that everyone assumes are safe.
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because [reasons]
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.
> 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.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.
Also unless managers in grocery store chains means something else than in any other corporation, I somehow doubt it's managers who monitor or "take action" on remotely-controlled fridges.
> 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.
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
Of course not. The security team was likely blamed, or the techs doing the test. All of the grunt labor should be ready for stupid management decisions on a moments notice and plan accordingly.
If you believe some of the emerging comments out there - try "Danfoss CVE" - you'll see that some of the suspects are 15-20 year old controllers like the Danfoss SM800 (EOS 2021) and SC355 (EOS 2016).
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.
This article theorizing US Army freezers were hacked to defrost, from late August this year - only about six weeks ago! - is prescient. It was posted here on HN.
> 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".
People underestimate just how much effort goes into minimizing food waste and shortages in these types of industrial systems. The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
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.
No, this “user story” does not mean the customer actually wants or uses the feature. You do not need remote command and control to tell if your truck chiller is working.
And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.
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.
There’s a whole massive industry out there of companies looking to make 2% efficiency savings on everything, and VCs looking for this. The glossy presentation might have even said 2FA somewhere so yes it’s definitely safe.
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.
IIoT (Industrial IoT) doesn't have time to deal with the load of bullcrap that cybersecurity is. Half of it is not even about security, but setting up moats and keeping control over users, which is very much not what you want to prioritize when setting up industrial infrastructure, and is rightfully rejected by engineers working there, who are concerned with safety and reliability first and foremost.
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.
> I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
I went through a manual you mentioned in another comment. It listed "High level of security against undesired user
access" as one of the features but it wasn't expanded upon. So I did more searching and found cybersecurity best practices from Danfoss.
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.
> 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.
Yes, there is little demand for this sort of thing when the potential loss, should it even come, is already insured. Your customer might actually not be users themselves but their insurance companies. It may be a better model to say pitch to them and then have them offer discounts to their clients who are using your tech that mitigates whatever % risk. Someone pitched that car probe to Progressive after all.
Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming out for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
Seems like two totally different issues. One is cost and one is efficiency gains.
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)
The people who should be held liable never will be. Their money is like an impenetrable shield to any sort of accountability. They'll just scapegoat the guy that warned them about the risk repeatedly for not doing more to prevent it.
That could be done by the servicemen or managers on-site. There is no reason at all to have remote control fridges. All this really does is make some higher up feel more importantl because they have a centralised controller, while providing very little real benefit.
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.
The benefit is the same as making websites remote controllable. A person then doesn't have to drive in to flip a switch, which means fewer people are needed to operate more systems, saving the company money.
We all keep a shotgun next to the printer in case it makes an unexpected noise here because the average HN reader knows a fridge manufacturer knows nothing about infosec and the lowest-bid contractor they farm the connection does the minimum to check the boxes. So yeah, we've been rightfully complaining about why does my icemaker need an internet connection for years.
Lets combine some testy topics: will LLMs make this any better? On the one hand, if it's easy for fridge manufacturers to churn out code, will the slop create enough cracks in the icemaker to sail the titanic through? Or will the lower barrier to pretty good security agents get more security into the IoT field (assuming it's taken advantage of?) Or will it not matter because the store manager will just set the web portal password to 123456?
Confusing title, both the original and the one here on HN.
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.
We all know the saying: The S in IoT stands for secure.
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around €7,000 [1]. So this is hardly the typical dirt-cheap IoT device you can buy for a few bucks from China. The product label also says "Made in Denmark."
This vulnerability certainly appears more complex to exploit than the ones routinely found in cheap IoT devices.
Still, I wonder why, in the age of Tailscale and Nebula, a large company like Danfoss doesn’t use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
That label only means most of the final assembly process have been completed in Denmark, it doesn't mean all HW & firmware inside of it have been developed in Denmark by vikings.
A lot of HW & FW by EU companies whose main specialty isn't HW and FW, tends to be outsourced to third party consultancies (sometimes even offshored), who won the bid to do it as cheap as possible, so you never know what quality you're gonna get inside of it, despite the provenance label.
One of the biggest scams right now is the Made in Germany label on cars/household appliances, which isn't in any way an indicator of quality like it used to be.
I promise I'm not simping for Danfoss, just because I'm danish, but... Is it really their fault the customers aren't putting these things behind VPN? Yes, the thing should be secure ideally, but why take the risk?
This is a great find, would be nice for it to be mentioned in the original article. It all worked out just like the title says. I guess someone didn't upgrade their firmware in time.
The security advisory linked in that article was published in August 2025. Apparently it took about a year to finish the writeup. Unless the supermarket also spent about a year without upgrading the firmware, it might be a newer vulnerability.
Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet.
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
Russia will never attack NATO, that would be their death knell. NATO is a hundred times stronger than Ukraine, who are kicking Russia's ass as we speak. I even suspect that if Putin were to order an attack he would be put down by his own people.
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
You think about a frontal attack like in Ukraine, and maybe you're right. But Russia is already waging a much more subtle war against NATO. Look at who's leading the US. Look at Brexit. Or look at who could soon lead France or Germany... Their conventional army may be weak, but they don't need to fire a bullet either.
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.
I would like this to be true but I'm not sure (at least when talking about NATO = Continental Europe). A quick search reveals Russia made 41 jet fighters last year, Europe made 40.
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 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.
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
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.
I have read some Asian country's (who are friendly with Russians) government foreign affairs required readings that is like 2 year old by now. Those materials say Russia is being cornered. They had no other option to but to invade Ukraine. But with sanctions they are more cornered and are desparate. They thought China would ally would them but China's selective neutrality is making them desparate. Those documents say that Russia never actually deployed their main regiments and only worked with mercenaries and allied country armies.
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
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.
> They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
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.
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
They cannot win, but they can invade. We're already in a hybrid war. The threat is real and Europe needs to be prepared and be able to stand on its own, especially now that also the US is not only directly threatening EU countries, but is acting against EU security both globally and internally by supporting separatist neo-Nazi pro-Putin parties.
people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
Yes, I always find it very useful to condemn the mosquitoes when someone is bitten. If they aren't heartily condemned, they will be legitimized and emboldened.
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
Offtopic: I only see "genius" used these days to describe an idiot. I guess this is how words change meaning over time. At some point in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
That's because calling an idiot an idiot plainly is apparently considered uncouth and attracts downvotes, flags and downvotes often mean oblivion. In fact you will find do-gooders chome in with "be civil" but you flip the word and it's all kosher. The thing is all of us do and say idiotic things. So that makes a bit tricky indeed.
> 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)
These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
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.
Digital hackers who cause real world harm effects should get treated like the terrorists they are with all that means in terms of the available inerdictions.
Nah, im glad hackers are exposing vulnerabilities in critical infastructure and logistics. Otherwise when some belligerent oligarch or politician or generally wealthy asshole decides they should rule everything they don't have easy avenues to fuck things up.
In the U.S. the following brands are affected (systems were proactively taken offline):
* 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.
> 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.
> A critical security flaw dubbed HomeHack exposed 1 million LG smartThinQ IoT home devices, enabling hackers to easily gain access to users’ homes and take full control over any LG smart device connected to the account, including dishwashers, vacuums, air conditioners and washing machines, found security researchers from Check Point.
I moved to a new apartment with all this stuff installed.
At first I thought exactly that - just why.
When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.
When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.
Connected A/C has been useful for me, because I also have a window fan and outdoor temperature sensors. So when target temp is below indoor temp but above outdoor temp, I turn off the A/C and turn on the venting fan. It's a lot more energy efficient.
Now, is it connected to the internet? Ha ha ha, no.
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
No. Politicians will do no such thing. There have been hacks/attacks of internet-connected appliances for more than a decade. LG is notorious for demanding that appliances be connected (why does a washing machine do when connected to the internet?).
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time
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.
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.
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.
On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.
Just when you think the golden age of hackers is over... Wasted food is bad, of course, but this is the kind of genius that military academies can never teach.
It's probably a small drop compared to the overall amounts of wasted food. I guess the hope is that it will teach some people important lessons, like "your refrigerator shouldn't be connected to the Internet, and if it absolutely has to, take some time to consider security".
> cyberattack, which has hit Danfoss-made refrigeration controls
Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now.
The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.
I think it's important to see if this could happen on a larger scale. What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints of food worldwide? What would happen to food prices?
There is probably enough variety in refrigeration technology that this scenario is unrealistic. There are many tens to hundreds of manufacturers worldwide.
…and that’s a good thing, as this non critical incident will raise awareness for safety in more critical domains like power plants, medical devices… oh who am I kidding.
Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.
The same happened to a major Dutch supermarket chain.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
This is literally everything that's wrong with the modern tech industry in a nutshell:
> 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.
Danfoss are quoted as naming two systems, AK-SM800 and AK-SC355.
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.
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.
Ugh, this is even worse. The vuln was just disclosed a couple months ago, and so it was literally just a matter of time if not all systems were patched.
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 have to question why this control system was even in place.
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.
Grocery stores do not use standalone refrigerators, I’m not sure why I have to keep repeating this fact when every single person has been in a grocery store and seen refrigerated cases that have a dozen or more doors.
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.
No need to make assumption here, the article says it clearly:
> 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
That doesn't excuse them being controllable over the Internet. I can understand that remote monitoring is important, but it's in a supermarket. There's always going to be somebody on site who can control things locally. The telemetry can be transmitted via data diode, automatically re-transmitting on schedule so there's no need for any remote control.
This is terrible. But, at the same time, why now? This seems like something you'd want to hold onto for use later as a nation state. And there's no money to be made here since you can't really ransom it. Was this just a petty attack to scare the public?
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
Script kiddies are on LLM steroids now. I’m so glad I kept my home "smart" stuffs fully disconnected from any network. No, I can’t control my home temperature from the other side of the world when in vacation, and so can’t the rest of the world until they physically enter it.
Alternative theory: Google's "mea culpa" on "misalignment incident" while testing the agents using their "next gen frontier model" is coming out in three... two... one...
I think that's exactly what happened. A kid found out (via an LLM or otherwise) that fridges' temperature were remotely controlled, probably with lax security (or no security at all) and decided to play with it.
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.
> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
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.
Come election day, do you really think many people's deciding factor would be a supermarket refrigerator incident from half a year ago? Especially considering that around the same time something far more... shall I say politically meaningful was happening at the same time, such as students protesting the lack of school funding?
I wonder if AI would have helped in this situation.
For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human.
I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application.
"But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
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?
Even if you are keeping updated buying your new fridge every 2 years like the manufacturer wants, that still doesn't guarantee you are out of the woods from this issue. By definition, security patches are retroactive, after it has been made obvious that there has been a security incident.
Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?
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?).
I'd hope what we'll actually see is people finally demanding that appliances with no need of an internet connection don't get connected to the internet!
The article makes it sound like these were intentionally networked refrigerator control units, not the actual refrigerators. But I’m not an expert, so I can’t rule out that it’s not possible to run a commercial refrigerator without one of these.
I mean, you could also argue that the lack of reliance on physical controls caused the incident in part. For example, a City's public works department may have remote access/control for some of their equipment, but they also have a kill switch that removes all connectivity and reverts the system to a default setting. They also have checks in place like "if the unit heater will be overamped, turn it off." This seems like it was caused by a lack of security considerations when making these devices "online". Old tech can work very well for a long time as long as it is modernized correctly.
I feel no pity for them at all. If they're too stupid to secure their fridges (which seem to be accessible over the internet) than that's their deserved pain.
Fridges tend to have built-in defrost cycles these days. Without that, ice builds up around the coils that ordinarily cool the compartment (and by extension the ambient moisture in the air, encouraging it to condense). And you'd have to thaw it yourself from time to time.
Every refrigerator has a defrost cycle - which is just a heater. It normally only runs for a few minutes at a time, but if you change some bits around, it could run for a lot longer and a lot hotter.
It's probably just running the heat pump in the other direction. 50° sounds about right for the hot side. I expect that the hotter the better, because it will melt the frost without warming the food. And if a bad guy hacks in to the freezer, he can probably override any kind of temperature control and just tell the compressor to run full out.
> Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
I wonder how many more decades of screaming into the void will be required for it to be taken seriously by those who deny any/all security efforts until after the disaster has already happened (and then still will only approve the absolute minimum required efforts)...
I realized upon reading too this was the same Danfoss fridges that got hit for .mil bases in the US. There's probably a shodan signature to find them on the internet because HVAC people don't know about network security, and someone has a trivial exploit to access them due to shitty ancient embedded controller security in them.
This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
Yes, not exactly "unprecedented." The news of Commissaries having their freezers hacked should have been a kick in the rump for everyone else with infrastructure needlessly connected to the Internet.
My guess, its a service contractor type situation, like getting a smart meter. You can opt out, you just wont have power.
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Somebody wrote the software that is the interface between the fridge and the internet. And while it would be nice if HVAC technicians would remember to only make this software accessible via VPN, it is in fact possible to write software that is reachable from the internet while still being secure
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
In the 2013 Target attack, the attackers used the HVAC contractors' credentials to gain access to Target's systems. The point of sale credit card terminals (what customers swiped cards and enter PINs) had no real security so the attackers were able to make those get "updates" from their own servers and download malware enabling them to get the magnetic stripe information as well as PIN (for debit cards). That year, I (like about 150,000,000 other people) got a brand new credit card with a new credit card number.
Newer PCI standards require much more secure customer-facing terminals and much more secure back-end systems so that much of this attack could not happen again.
Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
Because they need remote monitoring. I have experience with HVAC so I'm guessing these are similar: typically outsourced to a third party, typically a VM running on a dedicated server, accessible by Citrix or something similar. Supermarkets don't internally staff fridge repairmen.
Monitoring makes sense, but it feels like it makes no sense at all to allow that kind of remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves.
Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.
They aren’t fridges, it’s a grocery store. You have obviously been in one, there are cases with a dozen doors that all open to the same cold case.
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.
Given the perfectly workable alternative of not having remote monitoring and simply having the store manager contact a repair tech on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is an issue, yeah I think actually you do need to justify the added complexity and expense of making this kind of mundane equipment internet accessible.
I don't disagree, but having remote monitoring capabilities on a professional fridge is most likely not a hipster feature. Even mid-size supermarkets have dozens of them, with different temperature settings; they can fail, customers can block the doors, etc. You do want to receive an alert when something is wrong.
These are industrial fridges, the ones almost the size of a shipping container that you find in major supermarkets. But I agree with you that 'smart' home IoT is a shitshow.
Honestly I like smart appliances. For example, I have a home assistant integration that will sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room, and a handful of other similar safety-related conditions.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
It makes me happy to see stuff like this. There should be more of it. In a good world, this would eventually lead to serious fines, jail time, and more things that don’t need Internet connection not being Internet connected.
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.
And your SIL would just be as likely excited too about a MOEN wifi connected voice controlled kitchen faucet. Ain't it cool!
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 is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is easy, getting people (esp. leadership) to give a shit is hard.
Control loop is obviously local and performed by dedicated controller hardware. If you only need remote monitoring then don't expose any management functionality.
If you want remote management, then define an envelope of allowable system parameters that can be controlled remotely. Allowing defrost to be initiated remotely has obvious risks and known solutions - add a hardware interlock, like a physical button or a key switch.
Even if you ignore all other precautions and allow all parameters to be controlled without limitations, strong authentication is still easy to implement, if anyone cares enough to do it.
There's a marketing issue here that would need to be addressed first, namely the phrase "dumb appliance". That's a marketing slur that was intentionally propagated by manufacturers and it's bullshit. Few things seem more obviously stupid than the added complexity, expense, and security concerns associated with "smart appliances" especially given none of the features touted are critical to the appliance performing it's stated function.
I worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.
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.
There's huge difference between _sensors_ and _actuators_. You can put sensors online if you don't care too much about data leaking out. You put _actuators_ online... You need to be able to deal with the consequences.
How does this actually work, in practice? If you have read access to sensors, then there's a non-air-gapped network between the control systems and the internet.
If your network isn't air gapped, then it's vulnerable, and attackers will side step the "read only" path to write control system changes.
Exactly, this is bad security plain and simple
This is the way. Read only remote, write access requires on site access.
Managers can just call the store on-site employees. Or come in person. They just want to save on labor (aka replace humans with robots).
Supermarkets very efficiently drive down the cost of food so that food is abundant - basically everyone in developed counties has access to low cost food. Part of that process is not wasting overhead on having people manually checking various gauges.
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
Why not put them behind a VPN
Often attacks like this involve first getting on the VPN (leaked creds, a n-day on a web-accessible endpoint, etc) then running wild on the internal services that everyone assumes are safe.
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because [reasons]
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.
> 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.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.
Also unless managers in grocery store chains means something else than in any other corporation, I somehow doubt it's managers who monitor or "take action" on remotely-controlled fridges.
> 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.
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
Of course not. The security team was likely blamed, or the techs doing the test. All of the grunt labor should be ready for stupid management decisions on a moments notice and plan accordingly.
If you believe some of the emerging comments out there - try "Danfoss CVE" - you'll see that some of the suspects are 15-20 year old controllers like the Danfoss SM800 (EOS 2021) and SC355 (EOS 2016).
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.
This article theorizing US Army freezers were hacked to defrost, from late August this year - only about six weeks ago! - is prescient. It was posted here on HN.
https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...
Not sure if it's related but there was a vuln published in August for the freezers in the article
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
maybe groups have been looking for targets to use it on?
Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
> 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".
People underestimate just how much effort goes into minimizing food waste and shortages in these types of industrial systems. The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
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.
No, this “user story” does not mean the customer actually wants or uses the feature. You do not need remote command and control to tell if your truck chiller is working.
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And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.
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.
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There’s a whole massive industry out there of companies looking to make 2% efficiency savings on everything, and VCs looking for this. The glossy presentation might have even said 2FA somewhere so yes it’s definitely safe.
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.
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.
IIoT (Industrial IoT) doesn't have time to deal with the load of bullcrap that cybersecurity is. Half of it is not even about security, but setting up moats and keeping control over users, which is very much not what you want to prioritize when setting up industrial infrastructure, and is rightfully rejected by engineers working there, who are concerned with safety and reliability first and foremost.
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.
> I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
I went through a manual you mentioned in another comment. It listed "High level of security against undesired user access" as one of the features but it wasn't expanded upon. So I did more searching and found cybersecurity best practices from Danfoss.
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.
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Yes, there is little demand for this sort of thing when the potential loss, should it even come, is already insured. Your customer might actually not be users themselves but their insurance companies. It may be a better model to say pitch to them and then have them offer discounts to their clients who are using your tech that mitigates whatever % risk. Someone pitched that car probe to Progressive after all.
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...
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Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming out for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
Seems like two totally different issues. One is cost and one is efficiency gains.
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)
Thankfully these kind of attacks make pressure to finally have liability in software like in other industries.
The people who should be held liable never will be. Their money is like an impenetrable shield to any sort of accountability. They'll just scapegoat the guy that warned them about the risk repeatedly for not doing more to prevent it.
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That could be done by the servicemen or managers on-site. There is no reason at all to have remote control fridges. All this really does is make some higher up feel more importantl because they have a centralised controller, while providing very little real benefit.
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.
The benefit is the same as making websites remote controllable. A person then doesn't have to drive in to flip a switch, which means fewer people are needed to operate more systems, saving the company money.
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And I would bet dollars to donuts that someone at that company would respond "who's going to hack a refrigerator? Heh"
Send those asking that question the scene from Silicon Valley
We all keep a shotgun next to the printer in case it makes an unexpected noise here because the average HN reader knows a fridge manufacturer knows nothing about infosec and the lowest-bid contractor they farm the connection does the minimum to check the boxes. So yeah, we've been rightfully complaining about why does my icemaker need an internet connection for years.
Lets combine some testy topics: will LLMs make this any better? On the one hand, if it's easy for fridge manufacturers to churn out code, will the slop create enough cracks in the icemaker to sail the titanic through? Or will the lower barrier to pretty good security agents get more security into the IoT field (assuming it's taken advantage of?) Or will it not matter because the store manager will just set the web portal password to 123456?
Confusing title, both the original and the one here on HN.
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.
Freeze the Controller, Defrost the Food: Uncovering Vulnerabilities in Danfoss Refrigeration Controllers Amir Zaltzman / August 9th, 2026
https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
We all know the saying: The S in IoT stands for secure.
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
>The product label also says "Made in Denmark.
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.
I promise I'm not simping for Danfoss, just because I'm danish, but... Is it really their fault the customers aren't putting these things behind VPN? Yes, the thing should be secure ideally, but why take the risk?
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This is a great find, would be nice for it to be mentioned in the original article. It all worked out just like the title says. I guess someone didn't upgrade their firmware in time.
The security advisory linked in that article was published in August 2025. Apparently it took about a year to finish the writeup. Unless the supermarket also spent about a year without upgrading the firmware, it might be a newer vulnerability.
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Meanwhile Samsung doesn't even need hackers - a firmware update on consumer devices is enough: https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/samsungs-disa...
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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/
> This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network
So the current incident was a preemptive alert by Brussels.
Russia will never attack NATO, that would be their death knell. NATO is a hundred times stronger than Ukraine, who are kicking Russia's ass as we speak. I even suspect that if Putin were to order an attack he would be put down by his own people.
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
> Russia will never attack NATO
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.
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> NATO is a hundred times stronger than Ukraine,
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.
I would like this to be true but I'm not sure (at least when talking about NATO = Continental Europe). A quick search reveals Russia made 41 jet fighters last year, Europe made 40.
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.
> Russia will never attack NATO
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 is out of diesel because they're shipping it to Trump.
Drones run on diesel?
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They were out of diesel before Trump's announcement.
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.
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
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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.
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I have read some Asian country's (who are friendly with Russians) government foreign affairs required readings that is like 2 year old by now. Those materials say Russia is being cornered. They had no other option to but to invade Ukraine. But with sanctions they are more cornered and are desparate. They thought China would ally would them but China's selective neutrality is making them desparate. Those documents say that Russia never actually deployed their main regiments and only worked with mercenaries and allied country armies.
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
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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.
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> They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
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.
Never underestimate the stupidity and irrationality of autocratic governments. Putin also decided to invade Ukraine after all even though he should have known better.
Europe is rearming on the lines of the 1930s, because Russia is struggling to take a couple of villages.
They can't take Kiev but they're threatening Paris.
They cannot win, but they can invade. We're already in a hybrid war. The threat is real and Europe needs to be prepared and be able to stand on its own, especially now that also the US is not only directly threatening EU countries, but is acting against EU security both globally and internally by supporting separatist neo-Nazi pro-Putin parties.
Doesn't look like this needed a rampant AI, pardon, elite superintelligence:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079
What genius decided to connect a fridge to the Internet? Make him pay the losses.
By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.
Here in the UK, there's a £500 subsidy for home EV charge points... but only if they're connected to the internet.
What could possibly go wrong?
"What could possibly go wrong?"
The grid could stabilize as a side effect. And the cars are already connected to the internet.
people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
You could connect to an on-premise server. As a bonus, the manufacturer cannot disable them and extort money in this case.
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Monitoring requires one-way announcements, not bi-directional connections
Please find me a new car that isn't Internet-connected, genius. You're assuming consumers have a meaningful alternative.
Easy, go to the used lot and get one of the remaining actual cars before they become collectible antiques.
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Turns out it's mandated by law in the EU too
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Slate says “any minute now!”
It sounds like you are victim blaming. I apologize in advance if I interpreted you incorrectly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
Gallipolli, 1915:
"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.
> t sounds like you are victim blaming.
It sounds like you think victims are necessarily blameless.
Yes, I always find it very useful to condemn the mosquitoes when someone is bitten. If they aren't heartily condemned, they will be legitimized and emboldened.
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
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Offtopic: I only see "genius" used these days to describe an idiot. I guess this is how words change meaning over time. At some point in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
I don't think the definition is changing at all. To me, we've just lost the ability to comprehend sarcasm.
That's because calling an idiot an idiot plainly is apparently considered uncouth and attracts downvotes, flags and downvotes often mean oblivion. In fact you will find do-gooders chome in with "be civil" but you flip the word and it's all kosher. The thing is all of us do and say idiotic things. So that makes a bit tricky indeed.
> 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)
There should be a name for this style of speech, using "good" to mean "bad".
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just like 'Nimrod' becoming an insult
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Genius take!
People never learn:
https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...
Or, as one old and wise sysadmin would often say in the early days of the Internets, "the only 100% reliable firewall is a pair of scissors"
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/10/12/french-s...
These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
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.
Digital hackers who cause real world harm effects should get treated like the terrorists they are with all that means in terms of the available inerdictions.
They should be treated as pirates (law of the sea). I think terrorist are charged under piracy laws.
Nah, im glad hackers are exposing vulnerabilities in critical infastructure and logistics. Otherwise when some belligerent oligarch or politician or generally wealthy asshole decides they should rule everything they don't have easy avenues to fuck things up.
Vulnerabilities can be exposed by reporting them to the vendor.
Just need to setup some concentration camps to purity our race of the vandals.
Your struggle is my struggle.
In the U.S. the following brands are affected (systems were proactively taken offline):
* 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.
hacked or backdoored? [1]
> 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...
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.
Internet connected fridges are not new.
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...
Or keep duty-cycling the units until the pumps burn out...
my water kettle has wifi support for some weird reason.
who the hell needs connected AC and floor heating?
I moved to a new apartment with all this stuff installed.
At first I thought exactly that - just why.
When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.
When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.
So all in all - really not needed.
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Connected A/C has been useful for me, because I also have a window fan and outdoor temperature sensors. So when target temp is below indoor temp but above outdoor temp, I turn off the A/C and turn on the venting fan. It's a lot more energy efficient.
Now, is it connected to the internet? Ha ha ha, no.
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
No. Politicians will do no such thing. There have been hacks/attacks of internet-connected appliances for more than a decade. LG is notorious for demanding that appliances be connected (why does a washing machine do when connected to the internet?).
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time
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.
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.
So tossing out an idea:
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 suggest that supermarket fridges should not be connected to network?
Not any of the controls. At best they should simply report temps and operational status.
I think he suggests that manufacturers should be responsible for keeping their products reasonably secure.
It's super bad when even Appie is not safe from those Russians, etc.
Same (an outage) happened to the US military commissary system https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-09-01/army-cid-inve...
I was hoping there would be more discussion about the overlap of these two events.
The overlap between those two events is that digital security sucks ass and that attacks are much easier to mount in an era of agents.
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I came here for this very discussion. Shame more investigation was not done on this story.
On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.
Just when you think the golden age of hackers is over... Wasted food is bad, of course, but this is the kind of genius that military academies can never teach.
What a golden goose for hackers to have potentially every single facet of life, however large or small, network accessible.
Second order thought, this is going to create a nightmare of new AI regulations and if your company has European customers, prepare yourself.
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
Claude had munchies....
"claude, make better use of eletricity costs. stop services not required for the task. make no mistakes"
> cyberattack, which has hit Danfoss-made refrigeration controls
Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now.
The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.
I think it's important to see if this could happen on a larger scale. What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints of food worldwide? What would happen to food prices?
>What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints
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...
There is probably enough variety in refrigeration technology that this scenario is unrealistic. There are many tens to hundreds of manufacturers worldwide.
Similar issue affected a US military base very recently. Multiple manufacturers doesn't help if they source the same components.
By the way, Soviet refrigerators are immune to this type of attacks.
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…and that’s a good thing, as this non critical incident will raise awareness for safety in more critical domains like power plants, medical devices… oh who am I kidding.
Eventually a digital act of terrorism or war will be enacted that will kill thousands or more.
Maybe the agent swarm passed its “warmth” eval.
The same happened to a major Dutch supermarket chain.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
This is literally everything that's wrong with the modern tech industry in a nutshell:
> 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.
Danfoss are quoted as naming two systems, AK-SM800 and AK-SC355.
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.
It is a way to move the responsibility to the "users".
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...
Ugh, this is even worse. The vuln was just disclosed a couple months ago, and so it was literally just a matter of time if not all systems were patched.
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 have to question why this control system was even in place.
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.
> 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.
Hopefully it will extend to consumer tech like iPhones and other “waste as soon as {corp} is done with it”
Grocery stores do not use standalone refrigerators, I’m not sure why I have to keep repeating this fact when every single person has been in a grocery store and seen refrigerated cases that have a dozen or more doors.
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.
No need to make assumption here, the article says it clearly:
> 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
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I assume you’re talking about a system like this:
https://www.danfoss.com/en/industries/food-and-beverage/dcs/...
I'm with you on the remote monitoring but why do we need remote control?
Dispatch an HVAC tech if an alarm comes up. Physical access should be the only way to shut down a system like this.
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That doesn't excuse them being controllable over the Internet. I can understand that remote monitoring is important, but it's in a supermarket. There's always going to be somebody on site who can control things locally. The telemetry can be transmitted via data diode, automatically re-transmitting on schedule so there's no need for any remote control.
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“God news shareholders! We have decided that we didn’t make enough sales this quarter so we have EOLed a whole range of products!”
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“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-...
Here's a fix:
if(temp > 5) return;
Fridge attack! We live sci-fi indeed! %-)
This is terrible. But, at the same time, why now? This seems like something you'd want to hold onto for use later as a nation state. And there's no money to be made here since you can't really ransom it. Was this just a petty attack to scare the public?
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer
I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).
Manufacturer abdicated saying those models are no longer supported and so not receive security updates.
Wonderful world we live in where refrigerators and cars also become e-waste because a manufacturer gets tired of patching them
> 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.
Script kiddies are on LLM steroids now. I’m so glad I kept my home "smart" stuffs fully disconnected from any network. No, I can’t control my home temperature from the other side of the world when in vacation, and so can’t the rest of the world until they physically enter it.
Alternative theory: Google's "mea culpa" on "misalignment incident" while testing the agents using their "next gen frontier model" is coming out in three... two... one...
I think that's exactly what happened. A kid found out (via an LLM or otherwise) that fridges' temperature were remotely controlled, probably with lax security (or no security at all) and decided to play with it.
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.
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> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
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.
> why now?
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.
Come election day, do you really think many people's deciding factor would be a supermarket refrigerator incident from half a year ago? Especially considering that around the same time something far more... shall I say politically meaningful was happening at the same time, such as students protesting the lack of school funding?
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Who benefits from chaos? There is a war raging in Europe, maybe start there
Exactly. This is fifth generation warfare.
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You assume there must be some nation state behind it.
But it could be just for the lulz.
Remember the hackers behind the seven proxies, AntiSec, which hacked the NATO library website, and went to prison for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec
I wonder if AI would have helped in this situation.
For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human.
I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application.
"But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...
In all likelihood, AI enabled this to happen in the first place.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
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?
Even if you are keeping updated buying your new fridge every 2 years like the manufacturer wants, that still doesn't guarantee you are out of the woods from this issue. By definition, security patches are retroactive, after it has been made obvious that there has been a security incident.
Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?
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?).
I'd hope what we'll actually see is people finally demanding that appliances with no need of an internet connection don't get connected to the internet!
I would expect a refrigerator to work 20+ years. What does a legacy product even mean this situation?
The article makes it sound like these were intentionally networked refrigerator control units, not the actual refrigerators. But I’m not an expert, so I can’t rule out that it’s not possible to run a commercial refrigerator without one of these.
I mean, you could also argue that the lack of reliance on physical controls caused the incident in part. For example, a City's public works department may have remote access/control for some of their equipment, but they also have a kill switch that removes all connectivity and reverts the system to a default setting. They also have checks in place like "if the unit heater will be overamped, turn it off." This seems like it was caused by a lack of security considerations when making these devices "online". Old tech can work very well for a long time as long as it is modernized correctly.
I feel no pity for them at all. If they're too stupid to secure their fridges (which seem to be accessible over the internet) than that's their deserved pain.
How in the name of fuck was a fridge even designed to be able to heat itself to 50 degrees C?
Fridges tend to have built-in defrost cycles these days. Without that, ice builds up around the coils that ordinarily cool the compartment (and by extension the ambient moisture in the air, encouraging it to condense). And you'd have to thaw it yourself from time to time.
50C seems a bit overkill for a defrost cycle.
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Every refrigerator has a defrost cycle - which is just a heater. It normally only runs for a few minutes at a time, but if you change some bits around, it could run for a lot longer and a lot hotter.
It's probably just running the heat pump in the other direction. 50° sounds about right for the hot side. I expect that the hotter the better, because it will melt the frost without warming the food. And if a bad guy hacks in to the freezer, he can probably override any kind of temperature control and just tell the compressor to run full out.
I thought that. Now looking for the heat setting on my fridge. I guess it’s in case you need to antifridge sometimes.
Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
> Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
I wonder how many more decades of screaming into the void will be required for it to be taken seriously by those who deny any/all security efforts until after the disaster has already happened (and then still will only approve the absolute minimum required efforts)...
Well, if we start counting from Morris worm, without liability in place, plenty more.
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
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... 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".
I realized upon reading too this was the same Danfoss fridges that got hit for .mil bases in the US. There's probably a shodan signature to find them on the internet because HVAC people don't know about network security, and someone has a trivial exploit to access them due to shitty ancient embedded controller security in them.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506
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 even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
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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
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In the 2013 Target attack, the attackers used the HVAC contractors' credentials to gain access to Target's systems. The point of sale credit card terminals (what customers swiped cards and enter PINs) had no real security so the attackers were able to make those get "updates" from their own servers and download malware enabling them to get the magnetic stripe information as well as PIN (for debit cards). That year, I (like about 150,000,000 other people) got a brand new credit card with a new credit card number.
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...
> Grocer w/ 2% margins
You have clearly never stepped foot inside an Albert Heijn store.
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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.
Why is this even connected to the internet. If you want to monitor it remotely, you can set that independently from the actual controls.
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.
Why the fuck are those fridges even networked!?
Because they need remote monitoring. I have experience with HVAC so I'm guessing these are similar: typically outsourced to a third party, typically a VM running on a dedicated server, accessible by Citrix or something similar. Supermarkets don't internally staff fridge repairmen.
They could just use connected temperature probes though. no need to connect the power supply of the damn compressor to the internet.
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You don't need to network the fridge though... You just need a networked sensor...
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None of the supermarkets were managed by Commander Adama, apparently.
Centralized maintenance and monitoring?
Monitoring makes sense, but it feels like it makes no sense at all to allow that kind of remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves.
Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.
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It seems like the sort of thing you’d do in-store and firewalled from the internet.
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That might justify a temperature probe in a dumb fridge. This smells of a salesman being here not an engineer though.
Makes sense but monitoring doesn't mean you have to have remote control of power.
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And centralized food destruction.
To monitor when something like this happens...
They aren’t fridges, it’s a grocery store. You have obviously been in one, there are cases with a dozen doors that all open to the same cold case.
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.
Given the perfectly workable alternative of not having remote monitoring and simply having the store manager contact a repair tech on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is an issue, yeah I think actually you do need to justify the added complexity and expense of making this kind of mundane equipment internet accessible.
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So you can get a notification when the milk expires.
Wait until people living north of Chicago learn that their thermostats are remotely controlled, when it's -20F outside.
Please, let this be the stone that starts the avalanche of consumers rejecting smart apppliances.
My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just can’t help themselves apparently.
I don't disagree, but having remote monitoring capabilities on a professional fridge is most likely not a hipster feature. Even mid-size supermarkets have dozens of them, with different temperature settings; they can fail, customers can block the doors, etc. You do want to receive an alert when something is wrong.
Those devices should be connected to air-gapped local network and not to manufacturer.
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Why the fuck does a fume hood need that?!?!?!?!
> Why the fuck does a fume hood need that?!?!?!?!
Why, so you can turn it on from your smartphone when you're out of town, of course!
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Exactly!
These are industrial fridges, the ones almost the size of a shipping container that you find in major supermarkets. But I agree with you that 'smart' home IoT is a shitshow.
What compelled you to buy a stove hood with a cpu and blutooth radio?
It was there when we moved in.
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Why would this time be any different than the last hundred times?
Honestly I like smart appliances. For example, I have a home assistant integration that will sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room, and a handful of other similar safety-related conditions.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room
Can you turn that off or do you just have to put up with the noise?
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I prefer the freedom of putting a pot of water on to boil and walking off to take a leak, personally. That would drive me absolutely insane.
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“Suck it, Jin-Yang!”
Wait until they figure out they’re all filled with butane as a refrigerant thanks to global warming.
well that will be explosive!
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It makes me happy to see stuff like this. There should be more of it. In a good world, this would eventually lead to serious fines, jail time, and more things that don’t need Internet connection not being Internet connected.
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?
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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.
And your SIL would just be as likely excited too about a MOEN wifi connected voice controlled kitchen faucet. Ain't it cool!
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!"
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.
> 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.
These incidents will bring back the appeal for dumb appliances, hopefully.
There's a marketing issue here that would need to be addressed first, namely the phrase "dumb appliance". That's a marketing slur that was intentionally propagated by manufacturers and it's bullshit. Few things seem more obviously stupid than the added complexity, expense, and security concerns associated with "smart appliances" especially given none of the features touted are critical to the appliance performing it's stated function.
Instead of climate change, let's call it "cyber change"...the rise of hacks of all kinds facilitated by AI
Gilfoyle again?