Chains in Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg say fridge temperatures rose overnight, similar to hack of French stores
Supermarket chains in Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg have said the temperatures of their refrigerators and freezers in dozens of stores rose overnight, prompting fears of a cyber-attack similar to one that caused millions of euros of food losses in France.
Sweden’s Coop chain told the daily Aftonbladet on Monday that six of its stores had been affected, while ICA said it was “aware that a limited number of stores were affected by an incident overnight which impacted their refrigeration and freezer systems”.
OP’s name checks out.
Boy this is hard to understand.
They had their warning from similar attacks a few weeks ago. Whoever was stupid enough not to pull the plug on this interface deserves the losses. From the costs for the freezer contents, they could have hired even a pricy security specialist.
Apparently the Swedish freezers were scheduled for updates for tomorrow, Wednesday. I guess too little, too late.
The Irish supermarket impacted only had 13 nationwide.
Based on their stock management they probably didn’t even know they had them 😂
Maybe we should stop putting appliances on wifi? Like, for everyone everywhere?
It’s worse. They were connected by 4G.
imagine having a freezer that’s susceptible to a cyber attack. Why the fuck is it connected to the internet? All it needs is a thermostat. The closest thing to a “smart feature” that might benefit is the ability to send a notification if power fails or temperature falls below a set value, neither of which should be hackable by an outside party.
Even then, you can just have a battery powered thermometer connected for alerts. These have been available for a decade or more. No need to have the fridge involved at all…
Right!? Haven’t we had these solutions for commercial fridges/freezers for quite a while now? Why on earth did we bring the internet into it? 😅
To warn the technical department when the temperatures start rising and something is wrong. Sellers would not really pay attention to some fridge or freezer being warmer.
There are four ways of doing that:
- people on site
- an internal network that can only be checked locally
- proper supervision network that can push its state outside, but not be altered from the outside
- whatever the fuck they did
Guess what option was picked.
That’s a great reason to be on an internal network, but it surely doesn’t need to be on the internet.
I mean, part of my job as a stocker of the frozen and refrigerated foods was checking to make sure the fridge and freezer’s temps were within spec every time I entered them, and to report if it was too warm or cold so it could be fixed.
Yeah, there are a lot of things I’m supposed to check at work too
Not to mention alarms and other ways of indicating issues. There could easily be a one-way signal that is inaudible to customers for example.
Let’s stick it to the man by destroying our own food. Europoor leftist are a lot dumber than American ones.
Where does it say that they’re leftists?
Stop fucking connecting everything to the stupid internet. Everything should be offline first.
The current way is if it can be connected to the internet, that must be done, it must be an advantage. Ditto with AI. People need to chill and realize that not everything benefits from this shit and sometimes you even worsen the product/service ffs. Just stop!
We bought a new Liebherr refrigerator, without a water connection and more importantly, no Wi-Fi connection.
Looks like people didn’t learn any lessons from the past cyber-attack. Well, these kinds of attacks will continue as long as users don’t take corrective measures !
Just unplug them… Decouple them from wifi
Curious to hear from someone more knowledgeable about security if this seems like an economic attack by another country, or what? The only other motivation I can see here is to force supermarkets to be more secure without doing serious damage (serious like people starving).
It’s most likely some script kiddie taking advantage of hilariously bad security practices. The attack three weeks ago was because the freezers were directly connected to the internet, running old vulnerable firmware with the username “admin” and the password always being the current date. This is probably going to end up being a similar case - might even literally be the same case, three weeks (and IIRC there’s been an update fixing it for six months) is such a short time to unplug your vulnerable freezers from the internet, after well.
Maybe not everything needs to be on the internet.
I think these fridges are only supposed to be on the local network so they can be controlled centrally, and I assume the attackers gained access to the network. I HOPE these aren’t connected to a Datacenter like those cheap Chinese smart lights
Oh im willing to bet they are connected outside in someway. How else is the company gunna sell a subscription for fridges?
The question isn’t so much, “Why were these on the internet?”, so much as, “Why were these not securely connected?”
At my last job, our AWS resources were firewalled off, only accepting connections from our internal VPN. To get on that, you had to be coming from the IP of an office or a DevOps team member’s home IP.
The local firewalls could have only allowed traffic to the freezer VLAN from the remote monitoring IP.
And that’s just two ideas off the top of my head. If my dumbass can do it, you don’t need a high level networking expert to fix this.
I work as an IT consultant, and this doesn’t surprise in the least. Non-tech companies tend to have terrible security posture and governance. It seems like they only implement a basic security posture if they have to by law or they got hacked and lost a lot of money. I think the unintended consequences of this hacks are actually helping supermarkets to get their shit together in cyber security
Yep! But this was the second such attack. I get being stupid the first time around, totally understandable.
YTF does a refrigerator need to be on net control??? Isn’t it a set once and forget it device? Maybe to monitor it to report a failure… but to CONTROL it???
it’s so they can sell subscriptions to the cloud bullshit.
It’s more convenient for the hackers this way, duh
Idiots…
