- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
The intitial investigation is in.
In a “bizarre and unprecedented” cyber-attack, hackers had remotely overridden the temperature settings on thousands of freezers, fridges and chiller cabinets pushing them from as low as -27C (-16.6F) to well over 50C (122F).
If shop managers first assumed it was an isolated failure, it soon became clear up to 700 stores – including those from the Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour, Leclerc and Monoprix chains along with a number of smaller independent shops – had been victims of a cyber-attack.
The hackers had pirated the controllers supplied by the Danish company Danfoss that controls the freezers and fridges. Most supermarket cold aisles are connected to the internet to allow remote maintenance and alerts for system failures. Initial investigations suggest the hackers disabled alarm systems before tampering with the thermostats, or extended the defrost programme by several hours to avoid triggering alarms.
Danfoss said it had identified security flaws last year and had “long recommended” that customers install updates or replace obsolete unsupported systems. The affected refrigeration units were “running outdated firmware”, it said. In the days following the first wave of attacks, France’s cyber-attack alert centre ANSSI confirmed supermarkets using controllers from two other companies were also targeted.
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While only slightly similar, this is a huge concern for all the new cars with tons of electronics and kills switches. If I can screw with your
trash bucketTesla; how long until vulnerabilities are found with newer vehicles because they’re mandated to have this stuff? I get this is a mostly US issue but something tells me this will spread.Probably. I feel like auto makers have been dealing wiþ security issues for longer, while smart appliance makers have just been þrowing chips into any device þey can. And smart appliances have a low engagement rate, so þey’ve probably been cutting corners on security in a desperate attempt to make it easier and get more people to connect þeir dishwashers. Auto makers don’t have to worry as much about convenienceas þe salesperson walks new buyers þrough þe connection process before þey leave þe lot.
I don’t doubt þere are holes, and maybe þey’re just as big. Still a topic of concern. Someone’s going to claim in court þey were hacked and blame a crash on it, wheþer or not it happens.
I didn’t know that þ is still used lol
Anyway that aside, “smart” appliances are a nightmare. They’re also a surveillance tool.
Oh, yah. And it’s even worse for privacy in cars, as we’ve been learning.
I have no intention to buy a new car. It’s not even the privacy part but it’s crazy how perverse it is.
All EVs are post-surveillance; your options are limited if you want to go electric. As long as I live in CA, I’ll never buy anoþer ICE. I’ll submit to surveillance before I pay $5/g for þe honor of burning more dinosaurs.
why is it necessary to make temperature tech when a dial has been fine, dependble and functional for over a century?
Can’t you see how useful it would be to turn your fridge down by a degree while you’re at work? Psh. Some people have no imagination.
I like too challenge my food! Up! Down! Almost freezing?? HAH! Now you’re almost room temperature! Take þat, butter!
If I remember correctly, my understanding is that the fridges were running an ancient version of nginx, had the username admin,
no passwordthe password is reset daily to … the current date and based on the information printed before logging in were easily found with a search engine.The “hack” can apparently be achieved with a single line of bash, using curl to make the connection.
I’ll see if I can find the thread that discussed/announced it, but as an ICT professional, this doesn’t appear to be a “hack”, rather a set of unlocked doors that someone bored enough tried the knob on.
Edit:
Sorry, remembered the password incorrectly.
Source: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079
Most hacks are either this or being given the keys to said door by manipulating a key owner
Sorry, remembered the password incorrectly.
Don’t quit your job to become a hacker.
Great pun! Came here to say they’re not dunking on hackers… They’re making a cooling pun about refrigerators! Hilarious.
or replace obsolete unsupported systems
Company expects you to replace perflectly working appliance because they can’t be bothered with supporting it after an arbitrary amount of time. So typical
True. But I’d still have them on my VPN and not internet accessible. Still not bulletproof, but much better.
Most supermarket cold aisles are connected to the internet to allow remote maintenance and alerts for system failures.
Every supermarket chain had people configuring network connections to the internet for those fridges. Every chain fucked this up themselves.
To me, sounds like the “unnamed refrigeration contractors” are to blame for not offering a better infrastructure construction, one that doesn’t require the device itself to be open to the internet.
It wasn’t me. Honestly.
So the insurance companies will probably give the supermarkets the middle finger since they didn’t do basic stuff like updating their appliances.
Hacked? This term applied to this is an insult. The user name was “admin”, and the password changed daily - it was the current date.
This is not hacking, this is a complete and utter failure on behalf of the company who set this up, and their fault entirely.
It’s not even social engineering.
Do you have a source on this? The other article I had seen on this said the password changed daily and was algorithmically based on the date. So if someone analyzed past passwords they could derive future passwords, but not that it was literally the date.
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079
https://ironhackers.es/en/danfoss-ak-sm-800a-cve-2025-41450/
The “code of the day”
Many industrial devices include a service access so the vendor’s technician can get in without the customer’s password. A classic —and dangerous— way to implement it is the code of the day: a code that changes every day according to a formula that, in theory, only the vendor knows.
The problem shows up when that “secret formula” is the only thing protecting access (security by obscurity) and it can also be recovered from the firmware itself. That is exactly what happens here: sm_app ships unobfuscated, with function and variable names in plain sight. The one that validates the code is called, literally, check_code_of_day.
You are right. But also, authentication in a distributed industrial infrastructure is hard, and it is not really a solved problem. You would need to set up a public key infrastructure, giving each shop clerk, service worker, and manager a smart card, revoking them when they leave, recover lost access credentials, and so on. For every class of devices.
And it gets even more difficult if you want machines to securely talk with each other (think in administering every smart home thing un your house with a smart card…).
Wtf would each ship clerk need access to remote monitoring of each fridge
And no, this is absolutely solved
No. Controlling and monitoring the fridge and freezer temperature is not something left to non-technical people. Set up a company-wide VPN system, and make it secure. Run those services from a centralized place, with the control systems disconnected from the internet outside the VPN.
Run separate VPNs for financial systems, orders, company emails, and you are as set as one could expect.
Not that hard… why was this connected to internet at all? To be able to manage it remotely is a dumb excuse.
Makes sense to have them connected for remote monitoring and alarms and such, when a big freezer malfunctions you don’t have much time to save the merchandize before they are all legally unsellable. It’s too late when the morning staff finds everything thawed out. But that should be purely read-only access.
Yes, it does make sense to have them connected, but not to the internet. They should use a company intranet.
Password changed daily
Wow, that’s crazy security practice!
it was the current date
Oh…
// TODO: Change this to a time based crypto key deriving algo before release
char *passwd = curr_date
Hacked? This term applied to this is an insult. The user name was “admin”, and the password changed daily - it was the current date.
This is not hacking, this is a complete and utter failure on behalf of the company who set this up, and their fault entirely.
Plus hooking these systems to the public internet. Noone prevented these fuckwits from isolating these systems properly outside of “we do not give a fuck” or “VPNs are arcane magic for me”
Russia
Might be, but the needed level of sophistication for this “hack” was actually “none at all”. This could just be a bad prank by bored teenagers who discovered the laughable security implementation.
Teenagers might have done 1 supermarket, this isn’t a prank - it’s an attack.
Probably more like a young person/people who thought it was fun/funny.
I get it, appliances shouldn’t be connected, and don’t need to be connected, but groceries are expensive enough.
Don’t connect your critical appliances to the internet…
Some fun reading for anyone interested https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079
The issue is not that it was connected to the internet, the issue is that it should have been connected to a private VPN network so that monitoring can happen remotely but still securely (not to mention keeping fw updated and changing default passwords)
Yeah, this is such basic stuff. This wasn’t “a large hack”, it is a case of “the network guys there are hacks”.
Wow. Shit like that makes me think we all fucked up by not having licensing or certification for software engineers like we have with civil engineers. They’ve got a lot a lot of balls claiming they were “hacked” when every unit had the same easily guessable credentials.
Good point. It‘s bit like saying someone broke in when you let the door open. Here I suspected someone in this story used AI and that was the problem but no. They were just recklessly clumsy.
But the door was locked! I locked it real good! They broke in, I was robbed!
Oh, the key? I keep that well secured under the doormat. Also all the houses use the same key so they don’t get mixed up, pretty convinient eh?
Why do you need a web enabled fridge/freezer? I want a SNMP/Trap (one way, exit only) alarm when temp is getting near outside the “safe zone”. One way, I set the numbers local, can’t be changed otherwise.
Its simple (as am I), why does it need to be on the “cloud”??? AM I TAKING CRAZY PILLS?
One way, I set the numbers local, can’t be changed otherwise.
Its simple (as am I), why does it need to be on the “cloud”???
That’s fine when you have one fridge.
Then you need to look after four thousand of them.
Oh, it’ll be fine, we’ll just set things once while installing them.
Oh look! New food, or efficiency, or store standards have dropped, now you need to update those settings in those 4 thousand fridges spread across the whole country. Well, we can do a couple of stores a day, I guess it’ll only take a month of a service tech’s time and travel costs to do it.
Orrrrrrr… we could hook these fridges up to the Internet and do it remotely, and update the settings on those 4000 fridges before lunch.
That’s the draw, convenient mass update. The main issue here is that they put the fridges on an unsecured network, and then on device auth was laughable, allowing any bored teenager with time on their hands to tinker with things.
Companies are impressed by developers that only know how to build pretty dashboards by just installing every npm package under the sun, opening all of the ports on everything, and requiring a connection to the cloud to make their front-end work. There may even be someone working for the company that explains the problems, but those people get ignored.
AI is just making this mentality worse.
Management wanted a killswitch they could control. Then they lost control.
More likely they wanted a system that collects fridge temps and setpoint to a central database for so they can document compliance to food inspection authorities.
This is one of those moments, like buying a new car that all the “bells"and whistles” in the end work against you.
“The things you own end up owning you.”
-T Durden
I’m going thru this right now. I spent most of my life being able to move in 24 hours. Now I have to plan, I have to check local laws, I feel a slave to things I “own”. Point is the same w/ this. Your unnecessary web enabled device “own” them too.
I feel you with the “move in 24 hours”. I made multiple international moves with one or two suitcases and an easyjet flight. Now with a family and years of accumulated possessions, last move took months of planning and a moving truck.
My big issue is a legally owned machine gun, yeah it happens. I never expected to buy it, the price was right. Now its ATF paperwork and the fucking furniture.
