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.
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.
Boy this is hard to understand.
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.
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!
deleted by creator
We bought a new Liebherr refrigerator, without a water connection and more importantly, no Wi-Fi connection.
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
At a large scale you want some settings to monitor temps and controling defrosting and cleaning. I’m sure energy management is also helpful if there is a power cut or the backup generators are taking a minute out two to warm up.
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.
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
Yeah, this is why I resist getting a job actually doing mainly IT security despite having been part of far too many incident response and recovery teams over the years. It seems like a no-win job at the moment because leaders rarely value it.
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.
No they’re pointing out that supermarket owners are dumb as rocks.
Are supermarket owners in Europe typically… capitalist?
I am pointing out that the system that creates and maintains ‘supermarket owners’ does so in a way that also selects for and emphasizes certain traits in supermarket owners.
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?
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
Milk will have problems if it’s the 50c fast-defrost cycle that the fridges in the first attack reportedly hit.
Oh yeah i guess it might have problems then
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?
Depends on the kind of conservation method they applied to the milk. Milk that was sterilized at lower temps is considered “fresh” and has to be kept refrigerated. Milk that has been pasteurized at higher temps is sterile and won’t cause bacteria to grow even if it’s kept at room temp.
This however changes when you open the milk and it enters in contact with microorganisms that are naturally present in the atmosphere and that can proliferate in the milk; to avoid this, you need to keep milk at fridge temps so bacteria won’t grow too fast (if you keep it open in the fridge for too long, bacteria will grow anyway and the milk will go spoiled).
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.
If the fridges were just turned off sure, but they were actually heated up to 50 °C.
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.
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
I work for the food industry, in automation. Our whole factory is connected. To the point that from my office, I can control most of the factory machines. From my office, from my laptop that needs to be connected through an ethernet cable to one of the tech network of the factory.
If I want to connect from another device, I need to set up a vpn with credentials and an authorised IP.
The only way to access our tech network from the outside is stealing my credentials and then ask some of my colleagues to authorise a device and IP for my credentials, something highly suspicious that would raise a lot of alarms.
I’m not going to say that a system like this is infallible but turns an attack like this extremely unlikely. This is how you should have your systems “connected”. Not through a login portal exposed to the damn internet.
Thanks I’m now in your system
Oh shit! While you’re in, can you please check my email and maybe answer some so I don’t have to tomorrow?
Thanks in advance!
