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”.
The first and foremost sign of intelligence is the ability to learn. Somehow, those supermarket owners seem to lack this important trait.
IT Security sits in cost center side of the business for these Legacy companies.
It’s very much a " everything is fine why do we pay you?" Or everything is broken why do we pay you?" Situation
You’re asking capitalists to slightly not maximize short term profit… good luck.
Perhaps worse, you’re asking people who are full of themselves to question whether they might have been wrong/uniformed about something.
Again, good luck.
They’re sitting exposed to the public internet with a well known and super basic password. If your shit is on Shodan, you better know in detail the multiple layers of protection in use. Today’s date is not a password.
I think the takeaway here is how lucky these supermarkets have been. Any threat actor who’s organized would recognize the potential here and work to establish a proper foothold in the organization and try to pivot to corporate or payment networks. Instead they’re just turning off the refrigerators.
They are grocery stores, not some break room fridge. This attack is both economic (for the spoiled food that needs to be thrown out and the price increase that will come with that reduced supply) and on health (because not all spoiled food will necessarily be recognized as such in an effort to avoid the first consequence, plus if the fridges containing milk go warm for a few hours, they can test some milk and it’ll probably still be fine, but that best before date is now likely useless at best or misleading at worst). Also, even if most food is fine, if some food isn’t, it will mess with some people’s heads pretty badly.
If the intention behind the hack was disruption and damage, IMO this is one of the more effective angles they could attack.
If someone has gained access to controlling their fridge temperatures and they don’t know what the hell happened in that time they should be getting rid of all that product. They shouldn’t be trying to guess what will be okay to sell to customers lol and they don’t have time to go through every product so it’s a toss all situation. Ridiculous waste for an unnecessary feature.
Milk will not have any problems if it was not opened in the first place
If that was the case, why do they spend so much money on keeping it refrigerated before people buy it instead of being kept on normal shelves with all the other “refridgerate after opening” foods?
Idk in other places but here where i live, many supermarkets keep it outside the fridges ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ah interesting. I know eggs can be (though the industrial washing they get changes that by removing an important protective layer), but figured the few times I got milk that went bad before the best before date it was because it wasn’t properly stored before I got it.
Might depend on the pasteurization method maybe? Like the “bring it close to boiling” doesn’t kill everything in it but the chemicals might? (Speculation)
Edit: apparently it has to do with the temperature it is pasteurized. There’s one version, most common in north America, that pasteurizes at slightly under a boil, which doesn’t kill everything in it and requires refrigeration before opening.
And then there’s UHT milk, which is pasteurized at 138°C, and this apparently kills everything such that the milk doesn’t need to be kept in the fridge until it is open, and is more common in Europe and parts of Asia.
Oh yeah, checks out then; I live in Italy and i mostly see UHT milk (which, strangely enough, i never wondered what it meant until now)
Stands for ultra high temperature.
Yeah except people turning them off now doesn’t preclude the freezers from your other possibility. It’s entirely possible someone somewhere has been sitting on access to those things for a while and only recently did a Claude script kiddie get in and start messing around with things.
Stop connecting shit to the internet, this is not a difficult problem to fix.
I was gonna argue that a local remote control alternative doesn’t exist, but I really don’t know why you’d need freezers to be remotely controlled. They’re more of a set and forget.
Walmart had that since the early 2000’s. Fucking bullshit then too. We once had a section go out and called corporate and they argued it was working because their computer said so. Fucking dumb asses we are looking at it and some asshat in Arkansas (we are in Texas) tells us we are wrong. They finally agreed to send a rep from headquarters to drive down and look for himself (who knows cost of that) just for that guy to go "yall right it broke. " Then.we got local guy come fix it.
But god forbid someone take a package of baby formula
Maybe we should stop putting appliances on wifi? Like, for everyone everywhere?
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.
The Irish supermarket impacted only had 13 nationwide.
Based on their stock management they probably didn’t even know they had them 😂
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!
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 more convenient for the hackers this way, duh
it’s so they can sell subscriptions to the cloud bullshit.
Why these on network with outside access?
Because stupid. There’s zero reason for them to be on the public internet beyond incompetent operational IT security.
In theory they gather all sorts of data so they can see how efficiently they’re running, whether maintenance is needed. If something goes wrong with one of the units they can dispatch a repair guy immediately, or have the store shift the food before any spoilage. If they’re smart about it they can use the data to set up an efficient preventative maintenance schedule and really stay on top of things.
A chain that has 500 stores with 20 units a piece adds up fast. They probably have a person at headquarters whose only job it is to stay on top of these units.
Exactly ; the concept itself is the real flaw.
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.
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? 😅
👏Stop 👏 making 👏 everything 👏 connect 👏 to 👏 the 👏 internet👏
So, is it still the outdated firmware they’ve been warned about and asked to update?
In the first round of attacks the password was apparently today’s date. Updated firmware won’t protect them from policies like that.
OP’s name checks out.
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.
We bought a new Liebherr refrigerator, without a water connection and more importantly, no Wi-Fi connection.
