- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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Why the fuck does a fridge need to be connected to the internet?
Also not cool: Who is the idiot that thought an insecure remote connection to fridges from 100 supermarkets was a great idea?
I mean my homies on !selfhosted@lemmy.world are asking daily how to set up a secure remote connection for their stuff and the answer is almost always “avoid if you can”
Why on earth would one need to remotely change the temperature in a supermarket fridge anyway? In the 8 hours the store is closed, there is no reason one would need this, and their underpaid employees could just be sent if for some off the wall reason they needed to.
It’s not the stores fault necessarily that they have internet fridges, because those are probably the only ones on market. Industry is forcing us into total surveillance.
I wanted to argue “for monitoring reasons so that someone notices when the temperatures are rising and something might be defect”. But then again you could just have a local sensor that reports to a server without the need for a remote connection TO the fridge…
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.)
Fridges being hackable in the first place is beyond a joke. I think it’s a ploy for the manufacturers to gather data from people downloading apps and making accounts, thus is for the benefit of the business and not the consumer.