Whether it was youngsters proving their skills or state sabotage, Europe’s most hacked country was left with a mountain of waste after food began cooking in freezers

A good article which covers a lot of aspects, including what happened technically, which software flaws were exploited, that the problem affected refrigerators which did not have updated firmware. It also mentions the EU cyber resiliency act, which has the specific goal to avoid such events.

Making industrial systems secure will be many years of work, since many are decades old and software and protocols were not designed with security in mind. This also affects consumer “smart home” systems and things like “smart TVs”, which are often not designed to have needed updates.

Worth mentioning that the effects of systematic attacks could be far worse - they can take out electricity, energy, and water infrastructure, payment systems, and bring things like chemical plants into an catastrophically unsafe state. The thriller “Blackout - Tomorrow will be too late” by Marc Elsberg describes such a (fictional) scenario with hacks targeting smart meters and industrial control systems for power plants, and it is in parts more realistic than one would wish. IIRC there have been such hacks targeting the oil company Saudi Aramco.

  • reksas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    The scale of the attack doesnt seem like it was meant to cause problem with food suppily. While it was somewhat far reaching, it was still that one storechain. I think it was either test to gauge the response, some gray hacker exposing pretty horrible level of security in a way that cant be ignored or some random asshole causing problems because they can. Only benefit i can think of for state level actor would be to use this as distraction to something else.

    With security level that shitty, it could easily have been just some random asshole causing problems for no reason at all. Doesnt take state level hacker to break into system where username is admin and password is just date of current day…

    Good thing the storechain didnt get any money from insurance. maybe they and others will learn their lesson from amount of money lost. Imagine if every store has this shitty security and someone coordinated an attack on everywhere at the same time. What bad level of security does is it widens who is able to break into there. (state level actors would be able to break into almost anywhere that is civilian level security, i think. Some random mid tier hacker might not)