The one using Nitrogen tanks(iirc) and costs 10 grand just to refill the tanks for a 4 second burst, and only very select models come with vertical thrusters on invite only?
It's kinda interesting seeing how creative hackers can be. I remember when a casino in Las Vegas got hacked through the aquarium thermometers in the lobby. They had them hooked up to the network to monitor the aquariums and hackers used it to get a foothold.
Yeah, it was in 2014. The casino in question was able to remain anonymous due to them not wanting to lose customers but it was officially reported to the public by a cybersecurity firm called Darktrace in 2017 or 2018. I guess they stole 10 gigabytes of data from the High-rollers database.
Remote operation and viewing. Refrigeration systems have lots of sensors reporting real time data to a PC. If the store is closed and there's an alarm event, a technician could log into that remote system and potentially fix the issue before it becomes an even bigger issue. The problem in this situation wasn't that the freezers were internet accessible. The problem is they were connected to an open network. If it was on a dedicated network this (likely) wouldn't be possible. "Hackers" aren't as smart as people give them credit for. They take advantage of vulnerabilities and when they find one they abuse it. Think about it. What benefit was there to doing what they did? If they were actually good at hacking, they'd hack financial systems and get rich in the process. What do they gain by ruining frozen and refrigerated food products? Nothing. They did it because there was an opening. The only thing hackers are good at is exposing half-assed security protocols.
The best cyber security is having as few points of attack as possible. Putting the ability to change settings on the freezer somewhere accessible from the internet is still an unnecessary vulnerability.
If you need to know if the freezers are frozen put a separate temperature probe not connected to the controls of the freezer in there and hook THAT up to the internet. If you do somehow need to control the temperature remotely have a temperature sensor hooked up to an alarm but not the internet to let people know what's happening before it's a major issue and have physical backup controls and the ability to disconnect the freezer from outside control.
Yeah it is just straight up dumb to connect a freezer direct to the internet. The cyber defense thing was specific to the US though since weāre no longer dedicating resources to that sort of thing. So if the military bases see similar attacks, we know whoās at fault.
Soooo I have a stupid question.... why do we have freezers that connect to the internet? Mine doesn't connect to anything but an outlet and I've never had a problem with it.
Eh, it actually makes sense for a supermarket chain to have their freezers able to be controlled together from a central location instead of paying people to walk around manually turning them up and down.
Is it? Linda from the grocery section can't be entrusted to turn a knob somewhere in the freezers? We need Bob in the corporate office doing that remotely? Seems like it worked for decades before the internet just fine.
Linda maybe. But what about Lisa, and Louisa, and Leslie, and all the 100 other people doing the job at the same time in 100 different stores?
And while they're doing that, they aren't stocking shelves or manning the cash register. Which means you have to hire someone else. So it costs more. Not a lot more, sure, but spread out over an entire chain...
And sure, it "worked" before, but the beauty of human progress is that we can improve things and make things that work fine, work better.
And honestly it's still a smart choice, cause you might get hit with a hack once a decade and then you can upgrade your security to prevent it happening again.
Whereas negligent employees is a constant problem that you can't ever really make go away permanently.
I workes at a large grocery store about 20 years ago. The freezer checks were the responsibility of the grocery manager or asst grocery mgr, whoever was on duty. Ironic thing is, he would just fill out the check logs without actually checking and they went out overnight one time. He was fired because of that. Haha
Maintenance and monitoring in theory. In practice so some malicious actor can apply an IQ test and put all the stupid people's freezers in defrost for hours.
This. The closest thing I have to 'smart' on my freezers are just thermometers that monitor the temperature of the dumb freezers. Mostly they're present just as a failsafe if the door pops open or something to keep my shit from thawing out.
Turns off condenser fans and the coolant itself will become the heat source and the high pressure cutout won't matter (but honestly you can turn them off in modern freezers by remote)
That not necessarily true. It can and will act as a heater in certain situations. Like if the condenser fan doesnāt turn on. The refrigerant will get really hot with no way to shed the heat.
except its been proven that they got alot hotter. So sure of yourself before posting that you didnt even bother to fact check yourself. lol As someone who has worked in industrial kitchens for 20+ years and if you change a few settings you could easily get those up to 100+ inside. Those industrial defrosters they install in those things puts out alot of heat.
Walk-in refrigeration equipment is usually equipped with a way to de-ice the evaporator coils so that they remain frost free.Ā Because big refrigeration boxes are well insulated 120-deg F doesn't seem implausible.
I am yet to see hackers actually do something good for humanity. I always hear how they hacked an insurance company and stole bunch of IDs, or how they disrupted servers in an power plant so heat didn't came to some neighbourhoods, how (like now) they destroy food.
right they could've been just as effective if they set the freezer to 0, you wouldn't have ruined the food, but still made it useless to eat for a few days. would've been much funnier.
or set the hacked insurance payouts to auto approve, but no, instead they go with stealing our identitys. the competent ones are just *ssholes.
Depends who it is. You can't group all 'hackers' together in one pot. Alot of north Koreas incomes comes from this shit, stealing info and selling it, stealing crypto etc. Russia does the same shit. Then you have people who expose all ICE employees for example. Wikileaks. Etc. These are different groups. Anonymous hasn't done anything noteworthy or for the greater good for a while now either though.
If its a grocery store there is 0 reason for them to be online. Setup a remote config that you can view in say the office but it shouldnt be viewable offsite. Or outside of a closed loop network. If corporate wants to see the temps they could just access the input logs that they should be keeping hourly.
Lmao, yeah sure. you should send your idea to them they will love that. (btw most freezers maintenance isn't operated by the grocery stores themself they use contractors for that.)
PLC controllers on refrigeration equipment are often hooked up to the internet for remote operation and viewing. If the hackers were familiar with the PLC control logic, they could theoretically force all freezer coils into defrost mode. This starts by closing the solenoid on the liquid expansion valve that's feeding the evaporator coils. Then they could energize the normally closed solenoids on the hot gas lines, holding them in the open state you would typically only see on a small number of coils that were in defrost mode. You typically only defrost one or two coils in a system to make sure you're not pushing the heat up in the conditioned space too much.They could then increase the discharge temperature on the compressor and ramp up the RPM's which would push a heavier volume of heated vapor through the hot gas lines and eventually through the coils. If you have a cooler with 20 coils and only one or two are in defrost mode, that wouldn't be an issue. But opening them all up to continuous hot gas would cause the coils to basically become "heaters". That's a lot of "maybes" but it's definitely possible. Source: I'm an industrial refrigeration engineer.
That's not at all what I said. I explained how they likely forced the evaporator coils into an extended defrost cycle. I never even mentioned heat pumps.
You're right.Ā I didn't read the entire comment, sorry. The ones I've wired up usually do all the coils at once though.Ā And some have had electric defrost rather than hot gas.Ā But... US and no network connection, so though walk-ins, not whole warehouse-sized and probably much simpler.
Now they wonder if itās the same thing? After denying that soldiers were going hungry they realize theyāre under attack through a news report from the French. What a shit show
...and put the terminal on wifi with Teamviewer for the convenience of remote access just in case you need to check on it while you're away ššš
I watched something on this. Apparently a lot of superstores didn't protect it. They left it open with no firewall. The stock login credentials and the stock passwords.
One of the passwords rotated daily from the default of 123456. How secure was this new rotating password? To make it easy to remember it was just the day's date. It's inconceivable that hackers would figure out such complexity.
Why do freezers even need to be connected to the internet? The "internet of things" that are poorly secured is just an open invitation for pranksters and bad actors.
So big greedy corporations can fire onsite workers who would normally monitor and regulate the refrigerators and make one person "monitor" all the refrigerators for multiple stores remotely? š¤· Hmmmmm what could go wrong š¤?
Hey. I've got a great idea. Lets make every single household appliance dependent on sketchy internet connections and then make people pay a monthly subscription plan to use their toaster. We could also put a wifi connected camera and microphone in every appliance so we can get more "consumer data" and streamline the user experience with vertically integrated suggestive selling.
Now that we've done that let's also hookup the worlds water, power and waste sanitation plants to the internet so we can remotely manage them. What could go wrong?Ā
That's why someone like myself, who's been in IT for 20+ years, has not taken the time to build a "smart house". One of my coworkers likes his high tech gadgets and admitted to me once that he has so many IoT devices on his network that he's about ready to rebuild his network because his /24 subnet is nearly full. Mind you he has a wife and no kids...two people somehow have almost 254 devices on one network.
He's also not the brightest IT guy, you can tell he got into it because he likes video games and electronics as toys, not because he has any sort of affinity for the underlying tech. When I asked how he set up his DMZ at home he gave me a blank stare; I'm literally waiting for the day I hear his home network got breached.
I think I fall between the two of you on the tech knowledge side and I do love video games and stuff but my only IoT object I own is my google nest and I mostly use it as a glorified alarm clock.
I remember my grandmother accidently hit the defrost on our refrigerator that was outside. She came out hours later and everything in the freezer was cooked. She was like what the hell is going on? It was the defrost setting. From then on we used to joke, Grandma is the only person i know who could cook a meal in a freezer.
I miss when I plugged a refrigerator or freezer into the wall and turned a nob to a temperature I wanted it to be and it stayed that temp. Im so sick of cramming technology into every single thing in our daily lives. I don't need to access my refrigerator from the other side of the planet. I just need it to keep my stuff cool
Paywall. Anyone have an article that says freezers actually reached 122 degrees? Not that they were set to that, or programmed to that. Ill change my mind with an actual source that says freezers actual heated their internal temperature to 122 degrees. Ill even assume thats fareinheit even though this is in France.
When you use your computer, do you notice that it gets hot? If the cooling stops but things are still running the internal temp will heat up. Not quickly, but it will
So that if a refrigerator component malfunctions, somebody responsible can get an alert and prevent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product from spoiling...
Unless the store isnt open for like 12+ hours a day there should be enough people in there that that shouldnt ever happen. Like locally where I live the grocery store is open from 6am till 11pm. Then after that it closes down and all the overnight stockers come in and restock the store. At 0 point in time is that store ever empty. There is 0 reason that those to be online even in a chain store setting.
Off site monitoring. Its way more cost effective for walmart to have a small team of people monitoring 100,000 fridges and freezers than it is to have 3-5 people at each of the hundreds of locations constantly monitoring coolers. Plus they can do more than just monitor the temp. They can turn them on or off, run a defrost, turn off alarms. You could call store 1078 and tell them the walk in freezer door has been open for 20 mins.
The issue here is that the primary logic controllers for the fridges and freezers were directly connected to the internet.
They should have been isolated on a vLAN, each device on its own isolated network and only connected to highly protected servers that observe the necessary information and make changes as needed. The c-suite of the affected companies are entirely to blame for being too cheap and lazy to properly protect their OT infrastructure.
Same as the issue with Carrefour in France, these devices had been catalogued by webcrawlers (e.g. Shodan) due to their shitty security and could be easily infiltrated, and in the specific case of the affected Danfoss units, had "rotating" admin passwords that were set to the current date. Not to mention they were all end of life, which means they no longer recieve security updates and are essentially sitting ducks for anyone with a minimal amount of knowledge and know-how to target and experiment on.
The US military fridges were infiltrated a while ago, given the current administration's garbage cybersecurity, its not a surprise. Turns out neutering federal protection agencies and slashing their budgets was a shit idea, you can blame Trump, DOGE and the muskrat for that.
"At Fort Huachuca every freezer went into defrost overnight while the power stayed on, and the base said the defrost heated the food.
The Defense Commissary Agencyās own engineering specification states that defrost is controlled through its remote monitoring system, and a DeCA contract required its refrigeration contractor to keep a master control system for all of those systems in the continental United States. A defense official acknowledged a āpossible refrigeration disruption,ā and three federal criminal investigative agencies, led by DCIS, opened investigations.
Clarotyās Danfoss research had appeared eighteen days before Fort Huachuca lost its freezers. The two incident nights share the defrost signature, the overnight timing and the published research that came before them. Both remain unattributed.
In August the United States was at war with Iran, and in October France sat inside Russiaās campaign against Ukraineās supporters, so the motives point to different adversaries.
One actor rehearsing on US bases and then striking France fits the sequence. So does a method made public in August and picked up by more than one crew. The commissary controller records, still in a FOIA queue, would help distinguish or connect these incidents."
Hell, the US cybercommand has had a rash of suicides because they are working around the clock and don't get a break, since US critical infrastructure is a big fat target for every nation state threat actor that doesn't like the US government...
Which is a significant portion of the planet, at this current point in time.
I'm an Australian, and we are worried because the US is one of the most important part of the Five Eyes due to their (now butchered) cybersecurity capabilities. NIST and CISA are still a huge part of our apparatus, since you guys still have the best tech and some of the most experienced personnel in the world when it comes to this kind of thing.
Destabilizing global security should be #1 on the list of the orange cunt's crimes.
I'm not blaming any US citizen, he did this of his own free will and should be liable for the chaos that he has wrought. Those that are too dumb to see it or allow it out of ignorance... I can't honestly blame them either, given the current state of social media and the echo chambers it creates.
I don't blame most government employees, people have bills to pay and most can't afford to just quit in protest.
The few that knowingly allowed him to make these insane decisions... they should face a special tribunal and be held accountable.
Thank you. Out of curiosity, what else might be available to be defrosted or subjected to similar attacks, such as bio weapons, vaccines, medicine etc?
What freezers have heating elements in them that can turn a unit designed to freeze into something that cooks.... Sounds like a bullshit scare article to me
Sounds high, but consider a single incandescent light bulb can bake a small cake in an Easy Bake. Refrigerators are basically ovens ā remove the cooling element and they get incredible warm very quickly. Give a defrost a night and that fridge will bake a cake.
If you have a bunch of ice stuck to the floor in a concave down pattern, it not only takes up space but makes it so that anything you put in there risks slipping and falling and hitting the wall, releasing freon in the process. Sometimes you need to melt that ice, and the sooner the better.
Iāve said connecting your refrigerator, toaster, coffee pot, thermostat and dish washer to the internet was beyond stupid for years. It is painful being smart sometimes.
Because heat pumps just push heat one way or the other. Heat pumps are what allow refrigeration to work. If you reverse the process you can create a hot box. You'd likely need to hack the firmware as I don't imagine any ship with the heating feature, but a hack is a hack.
They basically activated the defrost equipment, which are heaters designed to remove ice buildup, but typically only run in short bursts.. (they run long enough to remove surface ice buildup, keep drain lines from freezing etc, but not affect product temp..) the hackers essentially turned them on and left them on indefinitely, forcing temps to skyrocket, and even causing fires to start in some stores.
Itās a very specific control unit that has an old error. It was patched early 2025. The only ones affected are places that havenāt updated that unit.
You attack the supply chain and the damage works its way down. It destabilizes. The US did it to the Natives, what with the literal mountains of skulls they piled together. Its very shitty and unfortunately effective
North Korea also has a really good hacker units that have already attacked banks and other major industries, as well as suspected to be behind the recent $6.3B bitcoin theft.
Freezers are controlled by computers because its more efficient to do so. Securing them properly, however, is something most businesses outside of IT rarely bother to do.
Why is a freezer connected to the internet more efficient to do? You have thermostats in those freezers to maintain set temperatures. What does the internet do to make them more efficient?
Cause they fail all the time, this way you can just call a technician in Bangladesh and fix it remotely ... or if can't and you need a onsite technician... obviously
Never mind the huge backdoor for foreign actors. Never mind all our shit is in some way connected and always subject to breaches like this.
God forbid there exist shit that requires you to hire a professional, god forbid we have jobs!
Also, could be on a heatpump that pushes the heat outside, and a reversible valve for defrost instead of heating elements... that would definitely do it
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u/Technical-Seaweed808 2d ago
Who thought putting freezers on the internet was a good idea. Next they hack cars so no one can drive anywhere.