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.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    7·
    3 hours ago

    Here is a detail that the Guardian article does not mention:

    https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117429502412235079

    So, it looks like the account was “admin” and the default password was the current date.

    Assuming this is true - No, with that level of security you really don’t need a nation state attacker to take all your infrastructure out. With the knowledge that there is a search engine called “Shodan” which lists internet-connected systems of a specific type, any teenager can do this.

    Given this, these comments from the Guardian article:

    Gérôme Billois, a partner in the cybersecurity and technology company Wavestone, said the hack had the hallmarks of political sabotage.

    “The two most feasible scenarios are either it was a group of youngsters or activists who wanted to blow up a few freezers to prove what they could do, or it was a destabilising attack, what we call sabotage, by internal or external state actors,” he said.

    “As for the attack’s signature, the most likely scenario is still a destabilisation attack – one designed to convey the message to populations that they are not safe, to convey the impression that the government is falling apart, and ultimately to instil fear.

    are likely due to either total incompetence, or plain disthonest to deflect blame for lacking even most basic security measures.

    (But I need to disclaim that I did not check that this reported default password setting is true. If it is, a lot of people should be fired.)