So the author charitably calls the 2025 vulnerability a "login bypass", but it's much worse than that. The firmware included a "datetime-based password" mechanism: a built-in backdoor password, like it's the 90s again.
The original researcher published about this in August of this year [1], a year after reporting it, titling the report "Defrost the Food", which the attackers apparently took to be a good suggestion.
As the firmware is open for anyone to download [2], blurring the affected function seems more like an invitation to find out more. I know I was curious when the news about the fridges in France broke. The function's actually called "check_code_of_the_day", and this is the implementation:
I'm was super glad I could just copy/paste that code in my LLM-of-choice and it gave me a reasonable explanation of how to exploit it. Thank god an attacker couldn't do that.
The fact that Russia has access to LLMs that could decompile and explain this firmware ( and possibly even translate the explanation to Russian! ) is just another proof that this was definitely part of the hybrid war and Europe needs to spend a few more tens of billions on weapons and possibly impose restrictions on open weight LLMs.
Through my work I deal with grocery software and I can tell you that grocery software is ages behind the times. For most small retailers (small being a business owner with less than 10 stores in their retail chain, mostly local grocers) you are dealing with processes that would have been considered antique for the year 2000
So much security in the past relied on "no one would bother to look in to this". We now have armies of bots relentlessly scanning over everything which is the main reason everything has been getting hacked over the last few months.
I'm really hoping that if it comes to pass, millions of AI-based hacking agents running amok on the internet, exploiting every single thing they can find, will at long last finally cause companies to get their shit together and secure their systems.
Imagine if your neighborhood had a million autonomous door-opening drones randomly flying around identifying doors and entering them. It wouldn't take long for everyone to lock their doors.
I don't disagree with you. But let's expand.. Imagine every neighborhood had autonomous brick throwing drones randomly smashing windows. Imagine every neighborhood had autonomous flame throwing drones randomly setting fires. Imagine every neighborhood and autonomous gun shooting drones randomly killing. Imagine every neighborhood and autonomous grenade lobbing drones randomly blowing up walls.
You can not defend everything. At some point you have to realize the world works because not every exploitable thing is exploited and we live in a civil society (most of us anyway).
I get it, the internet makes things different. But your analogy doesn't work
You can not build a building that can not be destroyed.
My hope and what I see happening is that the major players in the software space are frantically patching as many bugs as they can right now to keep ahead of attackers, and we come out the other end with incredibly robust software.
All the unsupported iot stuff will be obliterated by malicious bots, but the next generation of iot will be both more robust and less directly exposed to the internet. Like how Matter devices sit behind a hub rather than directly connecting to the internet.
There is no evidence AI was used to do this and it feels like a random way to force AI into the conversation? It’s just spectacularly negligent behavior by people who think that they don’t have to trouble themselves with security, but want the convenience of having their stuff on the Internet for remote management.
You can do a one way link, sensors on infrastructure which emit data only but can not receive anything. Then another device like an ESP32 or whatever the industrial version is which reads the data and makes it available to the internet.
You now have the ability to remotely monitor the system but hacking it does not allow you to control anything. Though there is still a sizable amount of infrastructure which has no on site workers and needs to be remotely controlled.
The real problem is devices like this should NOT be connected to the internet and at worst air gapped. Theres no reason including cost that a separate computer just for the fridges etc is not sitting in the office of the supermarket. Pretty sure the destoyed goods and close time cost far more than the extra cheapo computer.
My belief is that is more about convenience than anything else.
It is also worth looking at why this is so, which most likely stems from the lack of technically inclined staff in every location and the cost of having a tech going from store to store everyday to deal with POS, back office computers, amd any other kind of device.
Now, can you secure all this? For the most part yes, but it is quite expensive to do it. Maybe they will do it now or they will go with “it cannot happen to us twice” thinking and not do anything substantial about it.
It's not just about having tech inclined staff, but just the whole staffing strategy in general. Most grocery stores et. al. try to staff as cheaply as possible and try to have their workers do as much as possible during their shift. This means that there's no extra time available that they're not shelving products, or sitting at the register.
Rather than have extra staff at the store to do stuff like monitor fridge performance, it's better to have them report stuff centrally and have someone or some tool monitoring thousands of fridges across the entire chain. This way you can send out repair teams and plan maintenance more efficiently.
Those fridges are from the 90s. You cant reasonably support it that long. It's not even just software. The PLC is fixed hardware, you can't simply patch that.
As someone who has worked with small and medium sized businesses, reasonable is extremely variable. I'm dealing with a small business right now that can't upgrade their perfectly good computers because of TPM issues. On one hand, I kind of get the reasoning behind it, but how can you hold a business of 10 people accountable for not knowing how to buy a computer that will be reasonably future proof? Every business needs IT on hand? I think that's asking too much. On the otherhand, you should know the tools you need to run your business. There's no fine line.
Oh, great idea. We should do that for software: force manufacturers to support their software with bugfixes as long as it is in use. And just bugfixes, the marketing department can stay out of it.
This will never fly. Some devices can be used for tens of years and they may face vulnerabilities that the hardware cannot support any kind of software fix for them. Imagine the world moves to TLS2 or whatever something new will be called and the hardware you have is too slow for it.
On the other hand, saying an industrial device should receive security updates for 10-15 years instead 5 or whatever happens this days it will be a major step forward. This will incentivise vendors to use better hardware with room to grow, not just the cheapest components possible.
Or, make componente modular so that you can upgrade just the control unit instead of the whole fridge or whatever.
No one at Danfoss got alerts than sudently hundred of fridges entered defrost mode? Reminds me of those computer you see at stores running weird ms-dos software.
Many of these things have cycles where they clear frost or otherwise remove moisture from the system by getting hot. What you're talking about is something that could be common. It's the extended heating that starts causing problems, but if the software is taken over the alerts may no be sending.
To be fair, their entire threat model was likely "who TF would want to break in to change the settings on a thermostat on a fridge at a grocery store".
A valid question which has yet to be answered (at least not publicly).
It's a fridge. In a grocery store. You just get an employee to adjust the thermostat dial. How would the hackers demand payment if all you need to do is turn the dial back to "frozen"???
Edit: Yes i know the commercial fridges do not have "dials" and it's more involved. Still, if you have physical access to the thing, there's nothing that can be done from the outside that you can't revert.
> Still, if you have physical access to the thing, there's nothing that can be done from the outside that you can't revert.
Sure, with time and expertise. How does the average employee adjust the virtual thermostat on fifty network-controlled fridges before the food goes bad?
I don't know about your grocery store but the ones I've been to have maybe 5 on the shopping floor and probably a few more in the back. They all have physical controls which (I'm assuming) override the controller if something goes wrong. So if big bad hacker says "I'm gon' turn y'all fridges off if you don't pay me" it's not a threat, it's a silly joke.
Unless of course they turn it off without telling the businesses so the products go bad because nobody's watching over the weekend or smth. But then again, why would someone want to do that. I wonder.
Electricity is expensive. Grocery stores work on extremely thin margins with stock that literally turns rotten. These are physical devices that need maintenance. Their failure is often catastrophic. Grocery store workers are not equipped to fix an HVAC system. Someone needs to monitor for preventative maintenance.
I can't understand the mindset that would treat this as a trivial problem. What's sad is your confidence in giving this situation a 5 second take and declaring the whole thing stupid. Yes, security was clearly an issue, but saying that monitoring of critical infrastructure is sad is bizarre.
Remote monitoring by itself is not a problem, but remote control is and has no benefits. You can't change the temperature of or defrost a freezer without removing everything from it, and if you can remove everything from it someone is already there the change the settings. And it takes extra work to enable remote controlling of a refrigerator system over just providing temperature readings.
And it still isn't going to save electricity. The only thing it can do is warn of a failure and tell you that you got like 20 minutes to start moving food before it has to be trashed for exceeding safe food handling temperatures.
I mean, say you have 30 grocery stores, are you saying you shouldn't be able to build templates to deploy? You gonna have a guy drive all over the place updating schedules 24/7?
Because the things you have in the fridge change. The opening and closing of the doors change. The actual equipment changes. Store hours change. Holidays happen. Sports games happen. Weather happens.
To be honest, a grocery store is one of the most dynamic systems I can think of.
Edit: A bang-bang thermostat is not an appropriate solution for a grocery store.
That's called a thermostat and doesn't require remote control. The frozen food needs to be at the correct temperature all the time, regardless of external factors.
But they are perfectly capable of checking the temperature. After all the fridges and freezers are restocked multiple times a day so even if one failed it wouldn't have time to get warm before someone should notice.
Ad there are other ways of monitoring such as having an audible or visual alarm.
Do you think grocery stores are 24/7? How often do you think these checks happen? Do you think it's the best way for those employees to spend their time? How often would these checks need to be performed to show statistical significance? Do you have reason to believe these things have never been thought about by people who run grocery stores? What are the labor requirements in a grocery store to run effectively?
This isn't your single compressor/evaporator/condenser coil appliance that sits in your kitchen. These are far larger and more complex systems.
The AK-SM 800A can control 170 different refrigeration devices. This is more akin to the entire freezer section (and probably meat and dairy) in your supermarket.
Over the past few years it has fluctuated but not the same continued growth as before. If you don't have a Shodan account you can see a chart on twitter:
hard to say who’s to blame: stores, installers or the vendor. most of these dashboards sat online for months, only 195 of 1,331 had every fix, and 76% went offline within days of the attack (disconnecting was possible all along, it seems).
List of legitimate reasons for a refrigerator, an oven, a stove, a washing or drying machine, a microwave, a coffee maker, a sink, a garbage disposal, a toilet, a shower or bathtub, or any other home appliance to be connected to the internet:
The original researcher published about this in August of this year [1], a year after reporting it, titling the report "Defrost the Food", which the attackers apparently took to be a good suggestion.
As the firmware is open for anyone to download [2], blurring the affected function seems more like an invitation to find out more. I know I was curious when the news about the fridges in France broke. The function's actually called "check_code_of_the_day", and this is the implementation:
[1] https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...[2] https://www.danfoss.com/en-us/service-and-support/downloads/...
With all the disruption from AI on our industry, I can’t help but feel a little jealous.
Imagine if your neighborhood had a million autonomous door-opening drones randomly flying around identifying doors and entering them. It wouldn't take long for everyone to lock their doors.
You can not defend everything. At some point you have to realize the world works because not every exploitable thing is exploited and we live in a civil society (most of us anyway).
I get it, the internet makes things different. But your analogy doesn't work You can not build a building that can not be destroyed.
All the unsupported iot stuff will be obliterated by malicious bots, but the next generation of iot will be both more robust and less directly exposed to the internet. Like how Matter devices sit behind a hub rather than directly connecting to the internet.
There is no evidence AI was used to do this and it feels like a random way to force AI into the conversation? It’s just spectacularly negligent behavior by people who think that they don’t have to trouble themselves with security, but want the convenience of having their stuff on the Internet for remote management.
This is just like the OPM hack 10 years ago.
You now have the ability to remotely monitor the system but hacking it does not allow you to control anything. Though there is still a sizable amount of infrastructure which has no on site workers and needs to be remotely controlled.
Wait what do you mean you want to use a key to log in, our stuff doesn't support that.
It is also worth looking at why this is so, which most likely stems from the lack of technically inclined staff in every location and the cost of having a tech going from store to store everyday to deal with POS, back office computers, amd any other kind of device.
Now, can you secure all this? For the most part yes, but it is quite expensive to do it. Maybe they will do it now or they will go with “it cannot happen to us twice” thinking and not do anything substantial about it.
Rather than have extra staff at the store to do stuff like monitor fridge performance, it's better to have them report stuff centrally and have someone or some tool monitoring thousands of fridges across the entire chain. This way you can send out repair teams and plan maintenance more efficiently.
As long as the fridges are used the controller has to be supported.
This isn't a raspberry pi $50 a pop...
On the other hand, saying an industrial device should receive security updates for 10-15 years instead 5 or whatever happens this days it will be a major step forward. This will incentivise vendors to use better hardware with room to grow, not just the cheapest components possible.
Or, make componente modular so that you can upgrade just the control unit instead of the whole fridge or whatever.
“Why would a bunch of equipment malfunction?”
“Because you plugged it into the internet, you dolt.”
A valid question which has yet to be answered (at least not publicly).
Edit: Yes i know the commercial fridges do not have "dials" and it's more involved. Still, if you have physical access to the thing, there's nothing that can be done from the outside that you can't revert.
Sure, with time and expertise. How does the average employee adjust the virtual thermostat on fifty network-controlled fridges before the food goes bad?
Unless of course they turn it off without telling the businesses so the products go bad because nobody's watching over the weekend or smth. But then again, why would someone want to do that. I wonder.
so of course that creates/enables the problem and doesn't notify us.
deliciously ironic and rottingly sad.
this case was egregious - built-in backdoor pw - but that is downstream of the decisions to IoT them and to default them to listen on the network.
I can't understand the mindset that would treat this as a trivial problem. What's sad is your confidence in giving this situation a 5 second take and declaring the whole thing stupid. Yes, security was clearly an issue, but saying that monitoring of critical infrastructure is sad is bizarre.
And it still isn't going to save electricity. The only thing it can do is warn of a failure and tell you that you got like 20 minutes to start moving food before it has to be trashed for exceeding safe food handling temperatures.
To be honest, a grocery store is one of the most dynamic systems I can think of.
Edit: A bang-bang thermostat is not an appropriate solution for a grocery store.
But they are perfectly capable of checking the temperature. After all the fridges and freezers are restocked multiple times a day so even if one failed it wouldn't have time to get warm before someone should notice.
Ad there are other ways of monitoring such as having an audible or visual alarm.
The AK-SM 800A can control 170 different refrigeration devices. This is more akin to the entire freezer section (and probably meat and dairy) in your supermarket.
https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=http.favicon.hash:-853...
Over the past few years it has fluctuated but not the same continued growth as before. If you don't have a Shodan account you can see a chart on twitter:
https://x.com/shodanhq/status/2110526116679021055
- Get notified if a compressor fails, refrigerant leaks, or a door gets left open
- Catch failing fans, compressors, or defrost heaters before they break
- Automatically log temperatures for food safety inspections
- Optimize defrost cycles and compressor operation to save electricity
- Let technicians diagnose problems remotely instead of driving to the store
- Reduce power usage during peak electricity rates
- Monitor fridges and freezers across multiple stores from one place
- Track energy usage and equipment performance over time
- Get alerts when power goes out or equipment doesn't restart properly
There may yet be hope that a few stores survived. Possibly even a village or hamlet. In the vast rubblescape that is now France.