I wonder if the incremental efficiency gains from this outweigh the damages. That doesn't even sound like a bad idea, unless of course nobody stops to think "but what if someone hacks this".
The biggest issue is that many of these IoT devices are badly secured. I spent years trying to convince people to build more secure IoT systems, but they always preferred cheap and easy solutions.
For me this has always been true of systems in general all across the decades that I've worked with technology. It's like pulling teeth to convince anyone in charge that backups or security are even a little bit important until after there's been a costly disaster, then it's all about "Why didn't you warn me this could happen?" - Umm... You mean like every single day for many months until you told me to shut up about it because my paranoia doesn't justify the tiny expense of ensuring you don't lose many tens of thousands of dollars or years of irreplaceable work or important records?
Lets combine some testy topics: will LLMs make this any better? On the one hand, if it's easy for fridge manufacturers to churn out code, will the slop create enough cracks in the icemaker to sail the titanic through? Or will the lower barrier to pretty good security agents get more security into the IoT field (assuming it's taken advantage of?) Or will it not matter because the store manager will just set the web portal password to 123456?
It's funny because red storm rising is an old book at this point, but it's pretty accurately shown exactly how conflict with Russia plays out. Even down to Russia realising it is about to run out of diesel... causing it to invade Europe while it still can.
Then I remembered that both my AC and floor heating are connected.
A hacker could easily turn on both AC and floor heating and cause me a few euros of damages in my electricity bill.
2014:
> A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets.
> The fridge was one of more than 100,000 devices used to take part in the spam campaign.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25780908
Lessons were not learned:
2017:
> A critical security flaw dubbed HomeHack exposed 1 million LG smartThinQ IoT home devices, enabling hackers to easily gain access to users’ homes and take full control over any LG smart device connected to the account, including dishwashers, vacuums, air conditioners and washing machines, found security researchers from Check Point.
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/securi...
At first I thought exactly that - just why.
When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.
When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.
So all in all - really not needed.
Open weight models catch up quickly, so it is only a matter of time before Fable level models are in the hands of bad players
Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure *may* get their security patched in time. But there’s going to be so many vulnerable companies like in this case
IOT security needs to change.
There have been some changes to SCADA security, making it harder to hack into water treatment facilities (for example) but in my opinion, not enough.
Danfoss AK-SM 720 or 850? Pull the ethernet cord, now.
The latter can be flashed with the new 800A series firmware which is safer, but I still would not put it on the public internet under any circumstances.
Beyond some corporate manager seeing a dashboard that will cause them to say "oh neat" in a meeting once, there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online. Or frankly any network for that matter. Is there really such a massive productivity increase from being able to remotely change the temperature when a human has to physically visit the machine to restock every day anyway?
For example [request to defrost n fridges in y locations]->[agent cannot find any emails or business communications about this and last defrost report was only a short time ago, contacts z personnel]->defrost task moved to manual confirmation by a human.
I know many will roll their eyes and "tchh" at it but look at number of AI related topics on HN front page and think to yourself if you're tired of this tech not being used for real applications or not. This would be a real application.
"But it could be tricked" well...regular requests can apparently already be hacked, so...
andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...
I wonder how many more decades of screaming into the void will be required for it to be taken seriously by those who deny any/all security efforts until after the disaster has already happened (and then still will only approve the absolute minimum required efforts)...
For the same reason, we hardly have heating meters in Germany that aren't wireless connected to the maintenance company.
To save costs doing maintenance trips to check their state.
Modern HVAC and fire control b systems for buildings are often connected now as well
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
Yes, yes they did. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/28/...
"ALL freezers went into defrost mode – ALL frozen food has spoiled".
It would take something truly monumental to make a local supermarket owner even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
Yes, they're threatening and doing some low-key sabotaging (through third-parties for plausible deniability, which is good for us since we can choose not to respond), but they're shying away from actually killing people through means that might be directly attributed to them (like with a Shahed drone).
I do accept that Russia wants to hurt NATO for our support of Ukraine, but there's a limit to how far they can go.
You think about a frontal attack like in Ukraine, and maybe you're right. But Russia is already waging a much more subtle war against NATO. Look at who's leading the US. Look at Brexit. Or look at who could soon lead France or Germany... Their conventional army may be weak, but they don't need to fire a bullet either.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
No body knows how much petro product Russia is producing or who is buying them. Those diplomatic documents suggest treating simultaneously as a black box and a cornered animal. The financial sanctions actually was a double edged sword considering UK essentially blocked all foreign transactions even for international infrastructure investments Russia made to foreign countries and at the same time from a global perspective UK was not seen as a reliable financial partner. So, Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that. If a war happens across EU every party invovled will see this is to be positive thing because for the last decade economies has slowed down and political views has become extremely polarizing. A war at a massive scale brings everyone together for their country and economy jumpstarts.
If nothing else, war has been many times convenient to keep regimes in power (see Bush post 9/11 for an obvious example). Putin might want to strengthen his case. See absurd discussions / push for a "Republic of Narva" as an example cause belli.
They can't take Kiev but they're threatening Paris.
Doing it insecurely by, for example, having a device with a web server on the fridge is problematic. Not being able to deploy firmware updates. Having too much of the control loop exposed (as opposed to monitoring only), can lead to issues.
Service-oriented industries with costly assets will look to Internet connectivity for competitiveness and efficiency. It needs to be done better.
There are plenty of good reasons to do that. It’s not a consumer refrigerator, it’s a collection of evaporators and condensers and sensors that are controlled by an automation system. Remote monitoring can alert operators to problems so they can be fixed before the food spoils.
Authentication is hard.
Authentication is easy, getting people (esp. leadership) to give a shit is hard.
Control loop is obviously local and performed by dedicated controller hardware. If you only need remote monitoring then don't expose any management functionality.
If you want remote management, then define an envelope of allowable system parameters that can be controlled remotely. Allowing defrost to be initiated remotely has obvious risks and known solutions - add a hardware interlock, like a physical button or a key switch.
Even if you ignore all other precautions and allow all parameters to be controlled without limitations, strong authentication is still easy to implement, if anyone cares enough to do it.
They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.
The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.
The conversation was something like this:
HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."
Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."
To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.
Given that we agree that HVAC technicians can't be relied on for network security, this is 100% on the fridge company for having insecure software. If it's a bad password or an unchanged default password that's still on the fridge company for not enforcing something better
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-...
Newer PCI standards require much more secure customer-facing terminals and much more secure back-end systems so that much of this attack could not happen again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Sec...
You have clearly never stepped foot inside an Albert Heijn store.
edit: these are unlikely to be directly connected to the internet, but rather part of an internal network that got popped, likely a while a go too
These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.
And if you know your history you'd know that Russia had to pull out of WWI because the country literally ran out of men during the conflict.
Their political influence, even with right-wing politicians who might be skewed their way, will be limited. And could change at any moment as we've seen with Orban.
This is of course a stupid lie they are telling themselves. They've been invading Ukraine since 2014. They had the option of being good international citizens, with an elite flying to the west and buying some football teams for their entertainment, but they chose not to do that.
> Russia is desparate, EU is desparate but they are not allowed to sit in a table to negotiate... Because US will not allow that.
Russia can retreat inside their internationally recognized borders at any time. The problem is they don't want to sue for peace because that would admit losing, and include losing illegally annexed territory. They've made no serious attempts at even starting negotiations with Europe, while escalating "hybrid warfare".
These are commercial units. There is no plug. There is a circuit breaker in the back room, but general rules is only an electrician is allowed to touch them: if they are off there is always a good reason (until now) and so random staffers touching the panel to turn a breaker on is likely to kill somebody.
You'll find that these are quite complex control systems and their data may not be integrated into an operational or security control centre. So if they are not configured for, or resourced (in terms of operators), to handle anomalies, how do they notice and respond?
Without knowing anything about the attack it may be that the controllers were not connected directly to the public Internet, but an on-site VPN that became compromised some other way. Or with a compromised laptop of a technician that connected.
So while you are thinking about fridges today, think about how you would secure and operate control systems across tens of thousands of stores. Would that be easier without Internet connectivity? How do you get qualified and experienced technicians into each (air gapped) store? Another complexity is that many of these systems are part of facilities management systems (HVAC, lighting, security, fire control) and managed or owned by a completely different organisation that is not going to share their data.
I have been in meetings were the Data Security Officer refused to sign off on specific projects, without having a proper pentesting report in place, for example.
Because legally it would be their responsibility, if something would happen.
I think an actual invasion would initiate a very serious and deadly response, but their constant pranks will continue to go unpunished (unfortunately).
I have not. I travel in the ALDI circle.
2.1% net profit is what AI says the US grocery industry averages, so individual product margins would be higher.
It also wouldn't be a big deal when a supermarket employee makes an old-fashioned phone call (gasp!) to the refrigerator service company when some red light starts blinking ;)
So a lot of their territorial loss can be attributed to his inaction. If they'd laid several million landmines in the Donbass the Russian attack would've been stumped and the occupied Crimea would've been easy prey.
Responding to a NATO “attack” from Estonia, Putin can pivot to a bigger enemy where of course Russia has to employ universal conscription / nuclear weapons / whatever. The country must unite against this unprovoked western attack, etc, etc.
A single Tomahawk missile could obliterate Moscow which would immediately end the war because Russia is extremely centralized. It's the reason almost 80% of all Russian SAM capability is stationed around the city.
Putin is unpredictable but he's not stupid. You don't become president of Russia by being stupid.
The grocer likely has the least expertise. The HVAC company has more, but as evidenced by the article, not enough.
Now obviously, these companies have internal "information systems experts" but again, how does the banana guy interview a CIO ? Grocery store CIO might have gotten the job because he made the banana guy comfortable by talking about sports.
Each party was confident in a successful outcome, until the 15 year old kid across the globe pulled the rug.
The processes that created this situation were inadequate, because glad handing and name dropping cost less than formal systems validation.
Of course, the other way to view all of this is ... they just completed formal systems validation, found 1 bug, and paid whatever the food spoilage cost was for it, because no matter how much preperation one does on a project, at some point the power switch gets flipped, and its wait and see.
In a group project, noone is ever sure if Poindexter over there in the corner is quiet because he's quiet, or is quiet because he knows the code is crap and his boss ordered him to ship it anyway.
We're likely dealing with at least 4 companies here, if not more:
contracted programmers <-> fridge equipment maker <-> HVAC sales/service group <-> grocer
3 of the 4 companies could have all said to themselves "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws ? The grocer(s).
They're selling network-accessible equipment so it's their duty to make it secure within some well-defined envelope. How's that any different from any other part of engineering and product development?
> "Project ships on Monday, no matter what" because who carries the risks for any flaws
Soon that will be the OEMs, per the EU Cyber Resilience Act [1]:
> Directive (EU) 2024/2853 [on liability for defective products] of the European Parliament and of the Council (16) is complementary to this Regulation. That Directive sets out liability rules for defective products so that injured persons can claim compensation when a damage has been caused by defective products. It establishes the principle that the manufacturer of a product is liable for damages caused by a lack of safety in their product irrespective of fault (strict liability). Where such a lack of safety consists in a lack of security updates after the placing on the market of the product, and this causes damage, the liability of the manufacturer could be triggered. Obligations for manufacturers that concern the provision of such security updates should be laid down in this Regulation.
With floor planning, the loss itself could be spread across multiple companies, under multiple insurance policies.
With that said, this particular hack could easily be a systems / networking "configuration error" and not any particular piece of softwares fault ( as in a bug, or hardcoded backdoor password. )
The 'fridge company' and other product manufacturers decided to skip all that and run everything on a raspberry pi with apache, or an ESP32 soldered onto the control board, and call it finished. There are millions of these devices out there.
I happen to have a Danfoss HVAC controller here, and its controllable via Modbus. Its an older model, but its my understanding that larger HVAC systems commonly use Modbus.
Modbus systems are multi-drop serial, and the hack likely came in from the server side of one of the companies involved, and the HVAC controllers were all sent defrost commands. Thats my guess anyway.
I have a pump thats Modbus controllable as well, made by a company called Grundfos.
Gonna make a water battery.
Shift my cooling load into off-peak rate hours.
Stickin it to the power man. :D
Seriously, you guys would love these pumps.
https://product-selection.grundfos.com/us/products/magna-nor...
It has wifi. Neighbor kids are gonna defrost me. :(