- 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 The affected refrigeration units were “running outdated firmware”, it said.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.
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.
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.
It’s not even social engineering.
Wow, that’s crazy security practice!
Oh…
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…).
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.
Wtf would each ship clerk need access to remote monitoring of each fridge
And no, this is absolutely solved
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.