alt Hacker NewsSupermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack
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What's the incentive here? Just some tech anarchism? I would have figured that they at least demand bitcoin to reverse it or something. I know, people will blame the Russians, but seems not super productive for them to do such mundane sabotage on such non-critical systems.
I'm extrapolating a bit here based on Reddit hearsay, but I think this may have to do with rural stores having essentially consumer-grade internet routers connected to the mobile broadband network.
Much of the coverage in Swedish media drives the point that only 4G-uplinked stores have been hit so far. I think that's unfortunate, because really it wouldn't have differed if these stores were connected by 5G.
I'm guessing here, but my money would be on freezer ICS systems being made available to the world by accident by way of NAT-PMP on a consumer router. In Scandinavia you can bypass CG-NAT on mobile connections by setting a particular APN, so my guess is that these control systems were simply findable on Shodan.
This also explains why this wasn't discovered after the recent French breach. Supposedly all the stores with "proper" uplinks were in compliance, and no one had thought of a way in for those non-compliant stores, because they "weren't even connected, so how would an attacker get in?"
I would love to read about how insurance premiums are driving technology changes, in general. How insurance companies are tabulating risk from AI hacking. Risk of noncompliance probably brought the store operators to networked fridges, how is the network risk evaluated in general?
Insurance risk and premiums might be the main drag on the AI future.
Hope all the fridges in hospital keeping medicines at exact temperatures are better protected these days then they used to be.. The can't exactly be air-gapped wither as they need monitoring for compliance etc.
How did every supermarket chain around the world not jump at this and investigate?
This is actually good news. Accountability is everything when it comes to food supply. Forcing people to witness spoiled food is the slap people need to feel else they will never take action. The prolific insecure code that is keeping you from eating today will always be fixed.
Why isn't the brand of cooler or cooler-controller being named?
Was it a password break or an open admin console or SNMP or what?
I wonder if the companies affected this time missed the news about the French attack a few weeks back?
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50335602
Holy fuck don't connect your freezer to the internet. And if you do, have it be read-only, not change settings. Did we learn nothing from Battlestar Galactica?
here's hoping no country is stupid enough to have an ICBM on the internet
but you just know someone will eventually if not already
because some vendor thought it would be easier for monitoring or firmware update
Not officially at war (or even cyberwar) but... are we at war?
What sort of electronic shitfight is about to go down between major powers?
My fridge beeps loudly when something is wrong, and it has no connectivity to any network. Exactly how a fridge is supposed to be, why are we reinventing fridges…
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." But it should have been, like Bush said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
Why the previous attack wasn't a strong enough signal to make every European retailer unplug their freezers from the internet is a mystery to me.
Admin interface available on the internet without 2fa and automatic password change once a week? Anyone gaining sufficient experience and seniority in the industry becomes instantly unemployable, so it is what it is.
Two things:
1) I hope they learn some hard lessons about security and what should be exposed to the internet vs LAN.
2) These are some evil ass people doing this shit.
Can't tell if it will be some asshole hacker group, Russia, the us, or what. But for the love of God please stop connecting everything to the Internet and also ai...
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The magic question is: why isn’t this fixed yet? And then the specifics, the nitty grift of why not. Thousands of industrial fridges. They presumably all need new hardware, or at least tenporarily all need a RPi with additional software on the network cable, or it could even worse… are they on regular company wifi? Don’t these companies have VLANs? It’s astonishing that this is what brings billion dollar companies in a key supply chain down.
This little gimmick cost Ahold in the Netherlands an estimated 300 M€ a few weeks back. Enough money for any firm to set the engineers to work? Where they waiting it out? Having read some more… another part of Ahold (the Belgian part) was hit and has (only now…) taken all fridges down from the internet. What is IT risk doing in a firm like that? Internet of Shit is a decade old. I am not amazed non tech sectors are perhaps a bit slower in IT risk management. I am amazed that an ongoing attack situation can still cause trouble 4 months after publication and months after board level headline grabbing numbers are widely publicized.
Me and my crew (yet to form ;) will visit any fridge for a measly 100 K€ a pop to take them offline. Book early, because once the script kiddies hit, we are on the road.
Considering how Europe has embraced huawei and I saw a lot of their gear in consumer use when I was there, I’d be interested in seeing the Ben diagram of huawei gear and impacted stores
Hackers remotely override settings on thousands of freezers, fridges and chiller cabinets, pushing them from as low as -27C to well over 50C. Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour, Leclerc and Monoprix chains among those affected.
This is what happens when you over-optimize and over-automate. You should just be able to plug those freezers into power and turn a knob to set the temperature. There is no reason for them to ever have an internet connection.