It's probably a small drop compared to the overall amounts of wasted food. I guess the hope is that it will teach some people important lessons, like "your refrigerator shouldn't be connected to the Internet, and if it absolutely has to, take some time to consider security".
Yes, not exactly "unprecedented." The news of Commissaries having their freezers hacked should have been a kick in the rump for everyone else with infrastructure needlessly connected to the Internet.
This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
I realized upon reading too this was the same Danfoss fridges that got hit for .mil bases in the US. There's probably a shodan signature to find them on the internet because HVAC people don't know about network security, and someone has a trivial exploit to access them due to shitty ancient embedded controller security in them.
Only going to get worse as hackers get increasing access to more advanced AI models and compute
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
No. Politicians will do no such thing. There have been hacks/attacks of internet-connected appliances for more than a decade. LG is notorious for demanding that appliances be connected (why does a washing machine do when connected to the internet?).
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.
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time
They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.
For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.
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 is so much needless connection to the internet nowadays; this is the end result of a decade of shoving IoT into everything.
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.
There are a bunch of good reasons to connect a commercial refrigeration unit to the Internet (via IoT). Notification when failover to the secondary cooling system happens, notification of when ambient temperature is too high, optimisation of energy consumption (especially after hours).
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.
I didn't expect to spend so much time today thinking about fridges.
I have so many questions. If it's all so connected and monitored and notifies of issues, couldn't it notify anyone that the settings are weird, like continuous 50 degree Celsius defrosting? How much access did the hackers have, apart from temperature controls? Could nobody intervene quickly before the damage was done? Was there a way to "unplug" the fridges or they would just keep frying, so they had to get people across all the stores doing manual resets?
It can do all that IF YOU THINK OF IT and then write the program to do it. If you think of it - which is unlikely because it never happened before (or perhaps it did before but electronics are reliable and so you think it won't ever again).
These are commercial units. There is not 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.
Look for "Danfoss AK-SM 720 user manual" and scroll through the pdf.
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.
> there is zero reason to put a refrigerator's cooling system online.
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 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.
I always feel like such a buzzkill and Luddite when talking about IoT. My sister-in-law excitedly told me how her air fryer can be controlled remotely via an app. I think she also expected me — a techie — to be excited, but all I could see was unnecessary risk and usage data being slurped up by a corporation. I'm sure there are lots of good applications of IoT; however, I don't think this is one of them.
And your SIL would just be as likely excited too about a MOEN wifi connected voice controlled kitchen faucet. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the water bill comes and cannot pin point where the additional water they claim to have not used has gone.
Then we move on to even more serious potential life changing appliances that are wifi connected of which your SIL would certainly just be as excited about. Wifi connected hot water tanks of which some here know how they work and what this remote ability allows. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the medical bills come nor every single passing day when she sees the visible scars she must carry for the remainder of her living days for being 'cool' - ironic huh?
Reality hits hard as most humans are reactive and those that have been in this game for many decades grossly understand the dark side of insecurely connecting devices that have life changing implications. Medical devices companies have already shadowed their software mistakes yet such information only stays in the shadows for so long.
"What you cannot see matters most!" and many tech illiterates are currently learning this in most unfortunate ways. Some of that learning will scar both mentally and physically for life. Ain't it cool!
Many people here reading this are a lot smarter than I and such can therefore extrapolate and add to what is unfolding in the world. It shows little sign of stopping as more and more devices are connected daily under the guise of 'easy'.
Thus the underlying absolute reason to "Stay Healthy!"
Interesting. The government has been suggesting war with Russia is coming. This would be a great initial move. Take out the European food supply network, then hit things like the grid and the internet.
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.
Russia will never attack NATO, that would be their death knell. I even suspect that if Putin were to order an attack he would be put down by his own people.
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).
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.
Look at the former Soviet republics that helped Russia win WWII by supplying it with an almost limitless supply of soldiers. All of them have refused to allow their citizens to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
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 to fight 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.
> 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.
Russia continued WW1 with a civil war that lasted until 1922. Their military deaths were quite evenly split between the world war stage and the civil war stage.
And the might of the US/UK/etc are a hundred times stronger than the Taliban in Afghanistan, however who ended up winning that war? Or how about Vietnam?
My point being: the size/capability of a military doesn't necessarily result in a win. I think NATO forces have a particular problem of being pretty unmotivated about Ukraine winning.
I would like this to be true but I'm not sure (at least when talking about NATO = Continental Europe). A quick search reveals Russia made 41 jet fighters last year, Europe made 40.
I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.
GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.
You're assuming rational behavior, but time and time again world leaders have demonstrated that they will pursue erratic behavior if their feelings or vibe suggest them that behavior to be their way out of their own trouble.
You do know that wars are not “muh supurmun is bazzilion times stronger than your balk!!”?
Russia doesn’t need direct attack on NATO to intimidate, or even destroy the alliance. And even if it did attack NATO member, it is going to be guess what? A discussion. Just like what they have right now. It’s not going to be DEFCON style theatrical attack from the united West on Russia. You know what happens during WW2? When Russia and Germany carved up Poland? Nothing happened when France declared war on Germany. There was a period of 8 months where they just stared at each other. It was called “Phoney war”. Chances are we might witness Russia just steam rolling Baltics while the West talks between each other what to do next.
> Connecting your case controller to the internet offers further opportunities to generate savings. If you can diagnose issues and control the case remotely, service engineers needn’t be called out to simple situations like starting a defrost. And being able to compare performance and efficiency across an entire estate of stores makes it easy to spot patterns and make incremental efficiency gains. (https://www.danfoss.com/en/service-and-support/articles/dcs/...)
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".
Why are technicians (service engineers!) coming our for a simple defrost in the first place? The normal defrost cycle should be automated. For anything else you need someone to come out anyway because something is wrong - there is no point in starting a defrost cycle if the root cause is leaking refrigerant - fix the leak and refill the system both of which need to be done in person.
Because in some ticket tracking system, some customer with the most tickets was nearly always calling for a tech to physically start a defrost. Maybe solving that accounts for 2% of support overhead. It’s best to lose that customer. Second best is telling them defrost is remotely-triggered, and then not doing it. Third best is actually triggering it.
We all keep a shotgun next to the printer in case it makes an unexpected noise here because the average HN reader knows a fridge manufacturer knows nothing about infosec and the lowest-bid contractor they farm the connection does the minimum to check the boxes. So yeah, we've been rightfully complaining about why does my icemaker need an internet connection for years.
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?
The combination will be based on the proposition that AI must consume all and nothing shall get in its way (even if it AI), whilst maintaining the existing devotion to capitalism above all:
- Cheapest possible test-passing AI generated code with minimal check-box style security audit.
- Looser and broader definitions and greater penalties for hacking.
There’s a whole massive industry out there of companies looking to make 2% efficiency savings on everything, and VCs looking for this. The glossy presentation might have even said 2FA somewhere so yes it’s definitely safe.
The perspective of resiliency and how much will you lose if things go wrong seems kinda… new?
Funny that it should happen in France which has been at the forefront of European self resilience.
Seems like two totally different issues. One is cost and one is efficiency gains.
For the latter I would imagine you could have a short (maybe a month) logging period where you connect the fridges and collect data and then comeup with some offline system to manage them generally for better efficiency. You could even have a test group or single fridge that you keep connected to the internet for future data points (like in case of a giant heatwave or something)
People underestimate just how much effort goes into minimizing food waste and shortages in these types of industrial systems. The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
Connectivity in these environments is often challenging, it isn't like connecting a consumer fridge to wifi. Sometimes you are bridging weird networks that multiple parties need access to. It should be secure but that isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Many of these systems have very long lives, so there are many limitations that reflect the technology that existed when they were built.
All of this is invisible to the average person but it is what makes the world work.
And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.
Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
Except that in this case, the possibility of something like this probably is worth it, because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems, while ignoring the ability to improve system efficiency is a static stance. A lot of things have driven up the price of groceries since that time. You mention "comparable or lower inflation adjusted prices", but this hides the fact that the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation (105% vs a baseline of 94%), while the input costs to that supply chain (like labor, and diesel) have gone up faster. The efficiency isn't doing nothing, grocery prices would almost definitely be higher without it.
That's not what "vulnerabilities are solvable problems" means, except maybe for cybersecurity maximalists who believe that, "bro, add passkeys, and just one more thing, attestation, and W^X, and ..., and there will never be vulnerabilities".
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
Grocery stores infamously have some of the lowest margins in all of retail and typically hover in the 1-3% range. As a sector they have about zero room for inefficiency and have to be this aggressive about chasing operating cost reductions.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
Wonder the max price a company would be charged to ship a trailer of the largest boxes of Cheerios from say Maine to San Diego. Maybe fifty cents a box? You got me curious about the breakdown of the $9.
I'll admit I'm curious about the cost breakdown myself.
I did go ahead and do a query against gemini, and the estimate is 25 cents a box after considering long tail expenses (i.e. fuel, CARB premiums, etc.)
So, Less than you thought and way less than even I initially expected.
Mea culpa on my end, I wonder where the other parts of the price are coming from.
I do have other thoughts, but don't know California labor laws and the like enough to guess.
e.x. I know one big factor in the 'slowing' of inflation of grocery prices in my state over the last 20 years, has been the erosion of pay/benefits for workers. If California is still guaranteeing that for the workers (decent health care, at least a couple weeks of vacation time, etc.) and it's built into the cost... makes sense and TBH I wouldn't hate paying extra for that. Grocers here have with only a few exceptions gotten terrible.
That's the work that goes into hiding the "other half" of the inflation (i.e. the 2x diff between reported inflation and what you can actually see in your life).
Seems like these days stores just keep it on the shelves instead of throwing it away. The produce quality in even the more expensive stores here is abysmal.
I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.
No, this “user story” does not mean the customer actually wants or uses the feature. You do not need remote command and control to tell if your truck chiller is working.
What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
But you’re going to adopt a platform that meets the needs across your enterprise, so the capability is often there even if one situation may only call for monitoring.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
Yeah, and people sewed clothes per hand for hundreds of years until someone automated it with a machine.
You need to save labor somewhere to free it up for other jobs that give you technological progress. If everyone would still be occupied plowing fields with oxen, we wouldn’t have cars and computers now.
And you know what the customer needs? Or is this just a personal feeling. There’s multiple people from the industry chiming in on these threads as to why this is needed.
It looks more like they set a target level for shortages and then try to minimize waste without exceeding that level. Almost every time I go to Safeway, they have run out of some items I intended to buy. Trader Joe's is more reliable, probably because they have fewer items in stock.
> The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
I think the entire supply chain is making sure it has maximum profits extractable by law and any other emergent phenomena you observe is serendipitous and probably temporary, damaged or dropped as soon as the regulatory environment or marketplace changes to allow another dime of profit.
and the law says food must be safe, and to attract buyers costs must be similar or lower than the competition.
Of course in a cynical view companies only try to "generate profit" but usually generating profit is tied to providing some sort of service or product, and people like to buy good products
That could be done by the servicemen or managers on-site. There is no reason at all to have remote control fridges. All this really does is make some higher up feel more importantl because they have a centralised controller, while providing very little real benefit.
Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.
Our company makes IIoT gateway devices that log parameters from the system and push them to a read-only location. I've personally reverse engineered a dozen or so management protocols to get the data out because pretty much no vendor supports pushing temperature data to a centralized place. Those that have monitoring cloud software only support their own devices.
Every now and then our customers ask if we can add remtote control for specific parameters but we've always turned them down, citing liability reasons.
This sounds like someone (or someone's AI agent) saw the CVE and did a one-off drive-by attack instead of systematically targeting refrigreration systems and trying to find vulnerabilities.
The article is dated August 2026. Synacktiv (a different company) reported the very same vulnerability for older system managers/controllers already in 2023. Their report[1] says Danfoss told the products are EOL and should be upgraded. At no point did Danfoss fix the same issue in 800A. Typical.
Back in 2016 when we were integrating their 850 series system managers we encountered an issue with the HTTP API returning 400 series errors over slow links. We sent them PoC code written in Python 3. One month later they sent us an email, complaining that they first had to backport the PoC code to Python 2.7 as that was the newest version they could install. They also attached a "fixed" PoC code snipped where they had removed the artificial delays that did not trigger the issue. Danfoss never did anything to actively fix the issue.
One year later I browsed changelogs for the commercial RTOS that Danfoss used and realized the issue was fixed upstream in 2010 or 2011. That means their AK-SM 850 had at least six years worth of unfixed bugs.
In the recent heat wave being able to remotely tell which systems are about to fail helped quite a bit because you could take parts of the freezers offline to save the rest. There is no technician permanently on site at any of large retailer stores, you have mobile teams.
I thought about it and considered those "considerations" to be worthless.
> how it affects customer purchase decisions.
If nobody wastes energy in a stupid way like this, what changes? Are they no longer buying cold things? So what, then you sell more of the stuff that doesn't need refrigeration.
If there were two identical supermarkets, and one had running taps, and the other turned off their taps after using them, and paid their employes 5cents more a month, I would shop in the second one. But I can't, I don't get the choice, because a bunch of bunch of marketing people convinced someone to get an "edge" over the competition, and then told everybody else they have to, too, or they'll FaLL BeHiND. Kick those grifters to the curb and you'll save even more.
Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle makes sense. Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle to run for so long that it wastes products does not.
> Another good example why writing secure software matters in the age of connected devices.
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)...
I moved to a new apartment with all this stuff installed.
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.
My connected thermostat used the weather to determine expected outdoor temperature and sun exposure to adjust timing of heating and cooling as well as presence or absence of cell phone “at home” to adjust temperature range for savings. It also used cell phone approaching home to go back to normal temperature ranges.
My dumb thermostat also accounts for outdoor weather and sun exposure, simply by directly measuring the indoor air temperature which changes in response to those things. Dumb ones can also have schedule programming too. There's been plenty of times running errands when I approach home and then pass it up. Usually better to keep your temp constant than go through heating/cooling/big delta cycles generally speaking anyhow. One of those things where it feels like it makes sense but probably doesn't if you are coming back that day anyhow.
connected A/C has been useful for me, because I also have a window fan and outdoor temperature sensors. So when indoor temp is above target temp but below outdoor temp, I turn off the A/C and turn on the venting fan. It's a lot more energy efficient.
> 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.
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.
I wonder if AI would have helped in this situation.
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...
I feel no pity for them at all. If they're too stupid to secure their fridges (which seem to be accessible over the internet) than that's their deserved pain.
This is a great find, would be nice for it to be mentioned in the original article. It all worked out just like the title says. I guess someone didn't upgrade their firmware in time.
The security advisory linked in that article was published in August 2025. Apparently it took about a year to finish the writeup. Unless the supermarket also spent about a year without upgrading the firmware, it might be a newer vulnerability.
Thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't noticed that. I'd expect a large customer to be persuaded by Danfoss to upgrade within a year, especially before publishing the details of the vulnerability, so you're probably right.
We all know the saying: The S in IoT stands for secure.
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around €7,000 [1]. So this is hardly the typical dirt-cheap IoT device you can buy for a few bucks from China. The product label also says "Made in Denmark."
This vulnerability certainly appears more complex to exploit than the ones routinely found in cheap IoT devices.
Still, I wonder why, in the age of Tailscale and Nebula, a large company like Danfoss doesn’t use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
I promise I'm not simping for Danfoss, just because I'm danish, but... Is it really their fault the customers aren't putting these things behind VPN? Yes, the thing should be secure ideally, but why take the risk?
Agreed, it's not necessarily Danfoss's fault. The customer bought the appliance and is free to do whatever they want with it, that's what ownership is about and I fully support this.
But in a situation like this, who bears responsibility? The customer whose appliance is exposed to the internet, likely having been installed by an authorized technician in the first place, or Danfoss, whose now-insecure maintenance interface listens on 0.0.0.0?
As others have pointed out, this interface is intended for use by service personnel.
My point is simply that situations like this can be prevented in several ways: on the customers side, if they have a capable IT department, or on the vendors side, by designing with the expectation that some customers will inevitably expose devices to the internet, regardless of what the manuals and training materials say.
That label only means most steps of the final assembly process have been completed in Denmark, it doesn't mean all HW & firmware inside of it have been developed in Denmark by vikings.
A lot of HW & FW by EU companies whose main specialty isn't HW and FW, tends to be outsourced to third party consultancies who won the bid to be as cheap as possible, so you never know what you're gonna get.
In the U.S. the following brands are affected (systems were proactively taken offline):
* Food Lion, 1100 stores
* Stop & Shop, 400 stores
* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores
* Hannaford, ~160 stores
Websites are down at the very least.
May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery.
Mobile apps are down.
“In-app coupon” redemption is likely down.
US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.
It makes me happy to see stuff like this. There should be more of it. In a good world, this would eventually lead to serious fines, jail time, and more things that don’t need Internet connection not being Internet connected.
Confusing title, both the original and the one here on HN.
Three french supermarket chains had their refrigeration systems hacked.
Separately, a super market chain serving Belgium and the Netherlands shut down a large chunk of their IT systems due to a "cybersecurity incident", primarily affecting distribution centers and grocery delivery services. But the supermarkets are currently open, and do not have refrigeration issues.
Suspicious timing and these incident could well be related, but that has not been reported so far.
It could well be one ransomware attack on Ahold Delhaize, and an unrelated attack on a refrigeration supplier. Note that a similar refrigeration attack happened happened to a number of US military installations a few weeks ago.
486 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadYes, 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.
I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 - Aug 2026 (239 comments)
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.
They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.
For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.
If you want to defrost it presumably someone already needs to be physically present to unload the fridge?
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.
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.
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.
These are commercial units. There is not 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.
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.
She will not be as excited however when the water bill comes and cannot pin point where the additional water they claim to have not used has gone.
Then we move on to even more serious potential life changing appliances that are wifi connected of which your SIL would certainly just be as excited about. Wifi connected hot water tanks of which some here know how they work and what this remote ability allows. Ain't it cool!
She will not be as excited however when the medical bills come nor every single passing day when she sees the visible scars she must carry for the remainder of her living days for being 'cool' - ironic huh?
Reality hits hard as most humans are reactive and those that have been in this game for many decades grossly understand the dark side of insecurely connecting devices that have life changing implications. Medical devices companies have already shadowed their software mistakes yet such information only stays in the shadows for so long.
"What you cannot see matters most!" and many tech illiterates are currently learning this in most unfortunate ways. Some of that learning will scar both mentally and physically for life. Ain't it cool!
Many people here reading this are a lot smarter than I and such can therefore extrapolate and add to what is unfolding in the world. It shows little sign of stopping as more and more devices are connected daily under the guise of 'easy'.
Thus the underlying absolute reason to "Stay Healthy!"
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.
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).
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.
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 to fight 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.
Russia continued WW1 with a civil war that lasted until 1922. Their military deaths were quite evenly split between the world war stage and the civil war stage.
I wonder where then the millions of soldiers that fought the russian civil war came from.
A) Lots of Russians died during WW2, it wasn’t “evil Russia sends troops from occupied republics to fight for them while Russians sit back”.
B) Lots of mercenaries from post-Soviet republics fight for money on Russias side now
C) Russia didn’t pull out because they’ve run out of men. Where did you get this?
There are a couple of good WWI documentaries on YouTube which you can watch for free. You'll find that C) is the truth.
And the might of the US/UK/etc are a hundred times stronger than the Taliban in Afghanistan, however who ended up winning that war? Or how about Vietnam?
My point being: the size/capability of a military doesn't necessarily result in a win. I think NATO forces have a particular problem of being pretty unmotivated about Ukraine winning.
Conventional military powers sure seem like they were overrated.
Now Russia is one of only two players with years of experience in the latest generation of warfare, while NATO is still stuck in the 20th century.
I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.
GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.
You're assuming rational behavior, but time and time again world leaders have demonstrated that they will pursue erratic behavior if their feelings or vibe suggest them that behavior to be their way out of their own trouble.
Russia doesn’t need direct attack on NATO to intimidate, or even destroy the alliance. And even if it did attack NATO member, it is going to be guess what? A discussion. Just like what they have right now. It’s not going to be DEFCON style theatrical attack from the united West on Russia. You know what happens during WW2? When Russia and Germany carved up Poland? Nothing happened when France declared war on Germany. There was a period of 8 months where they just stared at each other. It was called “Phoney war”. Chances are we might witness Russia just steam rolling Baltics while the West talks between each other what to do next.
So the current incident was a preemptive alert by Brussels.
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".
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?
- Cheapest possible test-passing AI generated code with minimal check-box style security audit.
- Looser and broader definitions and greater penalties for hacking.
The perspective of resiliency and how much will you lose if things go wrong seems kinda… new?
Funny that it should happen in France which has been at the forefront of European self resilience.
For the latter I would imagine you could have a short (maybe a month) logging period where you connect the fridges and collect data and then comeup with some offline system to manage them generally for better efficiency. You could even have a test group or single fridge that you keep connected to the internet for future data points (like in case of a giant heatwave or something)
Connectivity in these environments is often challenging, it isn't like connecting a consumer fridge to wifi. Sometimes you are bridging weird networks that multiple parties need access to. It should be secure but that isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Many of these systems have very long lives, so there are many limitations that reflect the technology that existed when they were built.
All of this is invisible to the average person but it is what makes the world work.
Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
If only…
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.
I did go ahead and do a query against gemini, and the estimate is 25 cents a box after considering long tail expenses (i.e. fuel, CARB premiums, etc.)
So, Less than you thought and way less than even I initially expected.
Mea culpa on my end, I wonder where the other parts of the price are coming from.
I do have other thoughts, but don't know California labor laws and the like enough to guess.
e.x. I know one big factor in the 'slowing' of inflation of grocery prices in my state over the last 20 years, has been the erosion of pay/benefits for workers. If California is still guaranteeing that for the workers (decent health care, at least a couple weeks of vacation time, etc.) and it's built into the cost... makes sense and TBH I wouldn't hate paying extra for that. Grocers here have with only a few exceptions gotten terrible.
I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.
You need to save labor somewhere to free it up for other jobs that give you technological progress. If everyone would still be occupied plowing fields with oxen, we wouldn’t have cars and computers now.
I think the entire supply chain is making sure it has maximum profits extractable by law and any other emergent phenomena you observe is serendipitous and probably temporary, damaged or dropped as soon as the regulatory environment or marketplace changes to allow another dime of profit.
Of course in a cynical view companies only try to "generate profit" but usually generating profit is tied to providing some sort of service or product, and people like to buy good products
Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.
Every now and then our customers ask if we can add remtote control for specific parameters but we've always turned them down, citing liability reasons.
The article is dated August 2026. Synacktiv (a different company) reported the very same vulnerability for older system managers/controllers already in 2023. Their report[1] says Danfoss told the products are EOL and should be upgraded. At no point did Danfoss fix the same issue in 800A. Typical.
Back in 2016 when we were integrating their 850 series system managers we encountered an issue with the HTTP API returning 400 series errors over slow links. We sent them PoC code written in Python 3. One month later they sent us an email, complaining that they first had to backport the PoC code to Python 2.7 as that was the newest version they could install. They also attached a "fixed" PoC code snipped where they had removed the artificial delays that did not trigger the issue. Danfoss never did anything to actively fix the issue.
One year later I browsed changelogs for the commercial RTOS that Danfoss used and realized the issue was fixed upstream in 2010 or 2011. That means their AK-SM 850 had at least six years worth of unfixed bugs.
[1] https://www.synacktiv.com/sites/default/files/2023-10/synack... (despite saying SM800, the firmware in question is for AK-SM 850)
I worked with district heating, no idea what the cooling guys are/were doing. It's a big company.
So we spill cold air on the floor and heat the place with AC, then talk about low margins and having to save energy costs. Does anyone see the issue?
> how it affects customer purchase decisions.
If nobody wastes energy in a stupid way like this, what changes? Are they no longer buying cold things? So what, then you sell more of the stuff that doesn't need refrigeration.
If there were two identical supermarkets, and one had running taps, and the other turned off their taps after using them, and paid their employes 5cents more a month, I would shop in the second one. But I can't, I don't get the choice, because a bunch of bunch of marketing people convinced someone to get an "edge" over the competition, and then told everybody else they have to, too, or they'll FaLL BeHiND. Kick those grifters to the curb and you'll save even more.
Did everyone forget about Therac-25?
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)...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
Something like this seems fit for a newer variant of Taalas chip. In addition to regular security protocols, of course.
https://claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controller-de...
A quick search puts the list price of the touchscreen-equipped controller at around €7,000 [1]. So this is hardly the typical dirt-cheap IoT device you can buy for a few bucks from China. The product label also says "Made in Denmark."
This vulnerability certainly appears more complex to exploit than the ones routinely found in cheap IoT devices.
Still, I wonder why, in the age of Tailscale and Nebula, a large company like Danfoss doesn’t use overlay networks to make these services accessible only to technicians and other authorized personnel, rather than exposing them publicly. From a technical standpoint, a company with 40,000 employees should be capable to pull this off.
[1] https://www.lefroid.fr/fr/c/p/402785
As others have pointed out, this interface is intended for use by service personnel.
My point is simply that situations like this can be prevented in several ways: on the customers side, if they have a capable IT department, or on the vendors side, by designing with the expectation that some customers will inevitably expose devices to the internet, regardless of what the manuals and training materials say.
That label only means most steps of the final assembly process have been completed in Denmark, it doesn't mean all HW & firmware inside of it have been developed in Denmark by vikings.
A lot of HW & FW by EU companies whose main specialty isn't HW and FW, tends to be outsourced to third party consultancies who won the bid to be as cheap as possible, so you never know what you're gonna get.
* Food Lion, 1100 stores
* Stop & Shop, 400 stores
* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores
* Hannaford, ~160 stores
Websites are down at the very least. May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery. Mobile apps are down. “In-app coupon” redemption is likely down.
US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.
Three french supermarket chains had their refrigeration systems hacked.
Separately, a super market chain serving Belgium and the Netherlands shut down a large chunk of their IT systems due to a "cybersecurity incident", primarily affecting distribution centers and grocery delivery services. But the supermarkets are currently open, and do not have refrigeration issues.
Suspicious timing and these incident could well be related, but that has not been reported so far.
It could well be one ransomware attack on Ahold Delhaize, and an unrelated attack on a refrigeration supplier. Note that a similar refrigeration attack happened happened to a number of US military installations a few weeks ago.