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 to even consider the potential for their fridges to be an attack vector.
andy greenberg wrote a book on this -> https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a2d3f71e-e9aa-4947-8aa0-...
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
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
They are struggling to take a couple of villages in Ukraine, why would they invade the EU.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 always wait and see.
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.
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.
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.
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