This is terrible. But, at the same time, why now? This seems like something you'd want to hold onto for use later as a nation state. And there's no money to be made here since you can't really ransom it. Was this just a petty attack to scare the public?
On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
Script kiddies are on LLM steroids now. I’m so glad I kept my home "smart" stuffs fully disconnected from any network. No, I can’t control my home temperature from the other side of the world when in vacation, and so can’t the rest of the world until they physically enter it.
Alternative theory: Google's "mea culpa" on "misalignment incident" while testing the agents using their "next gen frontier model" is coming out in three... two... one...
Come election day, do you really think many people's deciding factor would be a supermarket refrigerator incident from half a year ago? Especially considering that around the same time something far more... shall I say politically meaningful was happening at the same time, such as students protesting the lack of school funding?
This is just one in a thousand problems that will happen until that day. This just makes the pro-Russian Lepen's party an excuse to repeat "the government is a disaster but we will make them pay for that". Replace it by <similar slogan of the jour>.
Just by the record, Europe has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia.
> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
Wow, are you an optimist. The manufacturer has stated that they're past the period of security updates. And others... meaning the supermarkets? They outsource that. The people they outsource it to? Maybe they'll start paying attention to security.
Because they need remote monitoring. I have experience with HVAC so I'm guessing these are similar: typically outsourced to a third party, typically a VM running on a dedicated server, accessible by Citrix or something similar. Supermarkets don't internally staff fridge repairmen.
A lot of these devices are temperature controllable as the product in them may require different temperatures. They can have temperature ranges from refrigeration to freezing.
Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.
You can schedule power usage with a dummy controller. I'm not sure of any products sold that are that specific to temp in my grocery store at least. Either it is refrigerated or frozen.
They aren’t fridges, it’s a grocery store. You have obviously been in one, there are cases with a dozen doors that all open to the same cold case.
There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.
I shouldn’t need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.
Given the perfectly workable alternative of not having remote monitoring and simply having the store manager contact a repair tech on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is an issue, yeah I think actually you do need to justify the added complexity and expense of making this kind of mundane equipment internet accessible.
From my experience in a restaurant, those large commercial rooftop refrigeration/freezer units need attention several times a year. It's rare that your home fridge would have trouble that often but commercial units are more complicated and in a harsher environment. And supermarket installations are probably even more complicated.
I'm pretty confident there is no failure mode industrial cooling equipment can experience that can be solved remotely. Remote monitoring and control systems on the other hand...
Suppose the condition is that temperature in the freezers is rising, producing active concern for the contents.
A smart person with the right access can see that, and also correlate it with other things.
Like:
The doors to the building are open, while the HVAC takes a break because the weather is temperate and isn't dehumidifying as it would be on a hot day?
And it's a holiday food-buying week, so the freezers' doors are open for buying and restocking more than usual?
If the refrigerant pressures and other stats also fit the scenario, then: The evap coils may just be iced up. If they can be defrosted from the comfort of your desk a thousand miles away, then that's pretty great. Just like what was done (to malicious extreme) here.
(You're a smart person. You could correlate these things yourself if this were your trade, save a trip [or many, many trips across a chain], and get paid to make these kinds of things happen remotely.)
"A smart person with the right access can see that", so like a store employee glancing at your choice of an analog temperature display or a telltale light? A perfectly workable solution that persists for the vast majority of the restaurant industry and every independent grocery store in the country, and has done for roughly the last century. Adding the kind of aggressively stupid failure modes that software drags into the discussion (eg. russian bot networks are attacking the ice cream) to avoid having to occasionally inspect equipment doesn't seem particularly bright.
These systems only exist because those economics were decided decades ago. Issues are not exceptions in systems like this. They are huge, complex, and interface with the public.
The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.
Marketing. The restaurant industry doesn't have less skin in the game than grocery retailers re avoiding spoilage and net connected walk-in coolers and freezers are not a thing.
Honestly I like smart appliances. For example, I have a home assistant integration that will sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room, and a handful of other similar safety-related conditions.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
I don't disagree, but having remote monitoring capabilities on a professional fridge is most likely not a hipster feature. Even mid-size supermarkets have dozens of them, with different temperature settings; they can fail, customers can block the doors, etc. You do want to receive an alert when something is wrong.
These are industrial fridges, the ones almost the size of a shipping container that you find in major supermarkets. But I agree with you that 'smart' home IoT is a shitshow.
This is literally everything that's wrong with the modern tech industry in a nutshell:
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
They sell fricken refrigerators for God's sake. Maybe I can understand planned obsolescence for a cell phone, but a fridge? And especially to grocery stores that operate on razor thin margins to begin with, the idea that they'll just dump their old working refrigerators because the manufacturer refused security updates is a guaranteed recipe for stuff like this.
Ugh, this is even worse. The vuln was just disclosed a couple months ago, and so it was literally just a matter of time if not all systems were patched.
I can't for the life of me understand why these systems aren't air gapped, or at the very least network access is restricted to a small number of IPs or hardware keys.
Danfoss are quoted as naming two systems, AK-SM800 and AK-SC355.
AK-SM800 looks like a current product. Danfoss have a PDF dated 2026.06 about it: https://assets.danfoss.com/documents/latest/590332/BC3376298.... This mentions "All new Electronics platform supporting new Operating System (based on Linux)", and specifically advises against connecting it to the internet.. Reading between the lines, especially section 10.5, it sounds like there was a major security revamp in 'release 4.0'. The article mentions "outdated firmware", so perhaps that refers to things before 4.0.
I haven't worked with supermarket control systems, so I only know what I've read in the PDFs, but it looks like this is not about throwing out entire fridges to update the control system. If you have the newer AK-SM800, it looks like the suggested action is to update firmware and follow instructions about keeping it well away from internet access. If you have the older AK-SC355, then keeping it away from the internet is even more important. Or, update to AK-SC355.
It's probably just running the heat pump in the other direction. 50° sounds about right for the hot side. I expect that the hotter the better, because it will melt the frost without warming the food. And if a bad guy hacks in to the freezer, he can probably override any kind of temperature control and just tell the compressor to run full out.
Every refrigerator has a defrost cycle - which is just a heater. It normally only runs for a few minutes at a time, but if you change some bits around, it could run for a lot longer and a lot hotter.
Fridges tend to have built-in defrost cycles these days. Without that, ice builds up around the coils that ordinarily cool the compartment (and by extension the ambient moisture in the air, encouraging it to condense). And you'd have to thaw it yourself from time to time.
I think it's important to see if this could happen on a larger scale. What if it wasn't only French supermarkets but also important supply chain chokepoints of food worldwide? What would happen to food prices?
There is probably enough variety in refrigeration technology that this scenario is unrealistic. There are many tens to hundreds of manufacturers worldwide.
Obviously, because they cannot be controlled over Internet. Also, some consumer Soviet refrigerators are still operating, they were made pretty reliable because one could not easily replace one.
There's a marketing issue here that would need to be addressed first, namely the phrase "dumb appliance". That's a marketing slur that was intentionally propagated by manufacturers and it's bullshit. Few things seem more obviously stupid than the added complexity, expense, and security concerns associated with "smart appliances" especially given none of the features touted are critical to the appliance performing it's stated function.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?
I'd hope what we'll actually see is people finally demanding that appliances with no need of an internet connection don't get connected to the internet!
I mean, you could also argue that the lack of reliance on physical controls caused the incident in part. For example, a City's public works department may have remote access/control for some of their equipment, but they also have a kill switch that removes all connectivity and reverts the system to a default setting. They also have checks in place like "if the unit heater will be overamped, turn it off." This seems like it was caused by a lack of security considerations when making these devices "online". Old tech can work very well for a long time as long as it is modernized correctly.
Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?
On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).
The article makes it sound like these were intentionally networked refrigerator control units, not the actual refrigerators. But I’m not an expert, so I can’t rule out that it’s not possible to run a commercial refrigerator without one of these.
Even if you are keeping updated buying your new fridge every 2 years like the manufacturer wants, that still doesn't guarantee you are out of the woods from this issue. By definition, security patches are retroactive, after it has been made obvious that there has been a security incident.
Offtopic: I only see "genius" used these days to describe an idiot. I guess this is how words change meaning over time. At some point in the future being called a "genius" will always be seen as pejorative.
people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
Yes, I always find it very useful to condemn the mosquitoes when someone is bitten. If they aren't heartily condemned, they will be legitimized and emboldened.
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
This came up on HN somewhere, and the answer was that insurance will decline claims if the modem wasn't in at the time of a crash, so it's risky not to have it. That and you fail inspection, but that's of course easier to work around.
Russian car mechanics know how to "unlock" Chinese cars that operate only within China and require a Chinese SIM card (they are sold locally at lower prices, so some people find it cheaper to buy a car in China and unlock it). Finding and disabling modems is definitely an easier task and can be done.
The same happened to a major Dutch supermarket chain.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
What if all manufacturers had to classify their product into internet connected i.e. smart or not. We mandate that manufacturer has to support updates for minimum 5 years or firmware source goes public. Have them put firmware source in escrow as well as have a way to update it.
If a manufacturer wants to reduce their liability then they have to release something to make it semi publicly supportable. With AI agents these days patching the firmware might one day be trivial.
Put some penalities with teeth behind this and maybe manufacturers will think twice before making everything smart.
On the one hand, this might be an escalation of a war below the threshold of "Europe orders general mobilisation". On the other hand, it seems that you just have to sneeze in the general direction of anything 'cyber' to cause an incident, shame on us if we can't get very basic security in order.
These vandals are what creates a low-trust society, where everybody needlessly suffers.
I remember working on my car when I lived in an apartment. I'd take my tools out into the parking lot, and get to work. If I needed to use the potty, or get a snack, or whatever, I had to pack up the tools and take them inside. Then out again. It really stinks.
I currently live in a high trust neighborhood where I don't need to be present with anything outside.
Digital hackers who cause real world harm effects should get treated like the terrorists they are with all that means in terms of the available inerdictions.
Nah, im glad hackers are exposing vulnerabilities in critical infastructure and logistics. Otherwise when some belligerent oligarch or politician or generally wealthy asshole decides they should rule everything they don't have easy avenues to fuck things up.
Not intentionally but yes it has a positive attribute if it happens on occassion regardless. How many millions of these units are in circulation that are vulnerable, how many others from other companies are built similarly? If someone wanted to start a war, attacking someone's food supply would help them immensely. And if this was just someone's blog post and bug report of "I can hack some refrigerator!", how many store owners and food suppliers would ever even notice or take seriously the risk? They spent money for these fancy systems that promised to help their business, and it ends up being a massively liability.
I never said otherwise. And if someone able to destroy and break things in my house remotely from anywhere in the world using hardware I bought, I would hope I could gracefully take it as a lesson for myself, and have a lot more questions for the company that sold me a product they assuredly claimed was secure.
Should, yes, but in my experience it rarely is prosecuted. Certainly the police did not care when my home was broken into and had things stolen and vandalized, even when I knew who did it and had proof. And then my insurance dropped me when I tried to claim it.
> How would you feel
I would be glad to know that's all that would have stopped them, and use that information to improve my home security.
The internet is global. These hackers could very well be government / military backed or bordering on terrorism. It's a lot more serious than petty vandalism and won't be solved by finger wagging about youths these days.
Companies and governments need to start taking security extremely seriously. Exposing insecure junk to the internet is a massive risk.
The article claims hundreds of supermarkets had their fridges destroyed at the same time. This is a massive scale attack to the countries food supply and very different to a person destroying a single fridge.
Cyber-vandals doing random attacks for the lulz incentivize, however weakly, stakeholders to securize their system.
Without them, all our infrastructure would crumble at the same time once an APT decides to go all in. At least here we get a preview of how bad things could get.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 94.5 ms ] threadOn the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer and others will have an increased security posture going forward.
But it could be just for the lulz.
Remember the hackers behind the seven proxies, AntiSec, which hacked the NATO library website, and went to prison for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec
Wonderful world we live in where refrigerators and cars also become e-waste because a manufacturer gets tired of patching them
We're in a "post-patching world" in that the number of 0days coming out is so rapid, I'm not sure it would even matter.
The physical architecture itself is the problem. There needs to be better controls (physical and software) to access those systems. Airgap possibily.
Just by the record, Europe has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia.
Wow, are you an optimist. The manufacturer has stated that they're past the period of security updates. And others... meaning the supermarkets? They outsource that. The people they outsource it to? Maybe they'll start paying attention to security.
I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).
Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.
There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.
I shouldn’t need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.
So we schedule service, and then we throw away all the food anyway because the problem cannot be addressed remotely.
Suppose the condition is that temperature in the freezers is rising, producing active concern for the contents.
A smart person with the right access can see that, and also correlate it with other things.
Like:
The doors to the building are open, while the HVAC takes a break because the weather is temperate and isn't dehumidifying as it would be on a hot day?
And it's a holiday food-buying week, so the freezers' doors are open for buying and restocking more than usual?
If the refrigerant pressures and other stats also fit the scenario, then: The evap coils may just be iced up. If they can be defrosted from the comfort of your desk a thousand miles away, then that's pretty great. Just like what was done (to malicious extreme) here.
(You're a smart person. You could correlate these things yourself if this were your trade, save a trip [or many, many trips across a chain], and get paid to make these kinds of things happen remotely.)
The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.
https://programmerhumor.io/networking-memes/the-ultimate-fir...
My fucking fume hood on my stove has Bluetooth, because Samsung just can’t help themselves apparently.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
> Danfoss told AFP in a statement that most of the affected equipment was "legacy" products which "no longer receive software or security updates".
They sell fricken refrigerators for God's sake. Maybe I can understand planned obsolescence for a cell phone, but a fridge? And especially to grocery stores that operate on razor thin margins to begin with, the idea that they'll just dump their old working refrigerators because the manufacturer refused security updates is a guaranteed recipe for stuff like this.
But the hack has already been disclosed and it's the responsability of the manufacturer to ensure that the fridge keep ever up to date or offline.
As with the USA Defense hack, it could have been prevented.
The hack: https://blog.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controll...
I can't for the life of me understand why these systems aren't air gapped, or at the very least network access is restricted to a small number of IPs or hardware keys.
AK-SM800 looks like a current product. Danfoss have a PDF dated 2026.06 about it: https://assets.danfoss.com/documents/latest/590332/BC3376298.... This mentions "All new Electronics platform supporting new Operating System (based on Linux)", and specifically advises against connecting it to the internet.. Reading between the lines, especially section 10.5, it sounds like there was a major security revamp in 'release 4.0'. The article mentions "outdated firmware", so perhaps that refers to things before 4.0.
AK-SC355 looks like a product from 2010 (that's the date in the PDF metadata, plus the examples in the manual mention 2009). https://3.imimg.com/data3/ID/LC/MY-3170595/danfoss-system-ma...
I haven't worked with supermarket control systems, so I only know what I've read in the PDFs, but it looks like this is not about throwing out entire fridges to update the control system. If you have the newer AK-SM800, it looks like the suggested action is to update firmware and follow instructions about keeping it well away from internet access. If you have the older AK-SC355, then keeping it away from the internet is even more important. Or, update to AK-SC355.
The largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands has currently halted most of its distribution centers due to an ongoing "cybersecurity incident": https://nltimes.nl/2026/10/12/empty-shelves-likely-albert-he...
I worry that this kind of thing is going to be a recurrent problem. A lot of people have pretty strong intuitions, or even an explicit moral position, that they should never have to upgrade a physical machine that's working fine. Is there a threshold of vulnerability that will overcome that, or are we just going to see a lot more hacking of random infrastructure from now onwards?
On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).
By the way similar thing might happen to geniuses buying Internet-connected cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duns_Scotus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
The evil victim blamers say "why was she wearing that short skirt?" They don't realize that the mosquitoes are sexist, and that we can and should eliminate all of the mosquitoes so she can wear what she wants.
"Hey, maybe we shouldn't send men over the top only to die in a barrage of machine gun fire..."
"That's just victim blaming--it isn't our behavior that needs to change; it is the enemy's behavior that needs to change."
Victim-blaming is another term that is apparently becoming a meaningless vibe.
In my experience, new cars have new car problems, but old cars have old car problems.
There’s no clear winner in every metric, just trade offs.
What could possibly go wrong?
The grid could stabilize as a side effect. And the cars are already connected to the internet.
Seems a coordinated attack, perhaps not coincidentally on the day the US supreme NATO commander gave a speech about the defence against (hybrid) attacks.
What if all manufacturers had to classify their product into internet connected i.e. smart or not. We mandate that manufacturer has to support updates for minimum 5 years or firmware source goes public. Have them put firmware source in escrow as well as have a way to update it.
If a manufacturer wants to reduce their liability then they have to release something to make it semi publicly supportable. With AI agents these days patching the firmware might one day be trivial.
Put some penalities with teeth behind this and maybe manufacturers will think twice before making everything smart.
I remember working on my car when I lived in an apartment. I'd take my tools out into the parking lot, and get to work. If I needed to use the potty, or get a snack, or whatever, I had to pack up the tools and take them inside. Then out again. It really stinks.
I currently live in a high trust neighborhood where I don't need to be present with anything outside.
It's so much better.
How would you feel if someone looted your house and justified it with "you should have used better locks?"
> How would you feel
I would be glad to know that's all that would have stopped them, and use that information to improve my home security.
Your struggle is my struggle.
Companies and governments need to start taking security extremely seriously. Exposing insecure junk to the internet is a massive risk.
Cyber-vandals doing random attacks for the lulz incentivize, however weakly, stakeholders to securize their system.
Without them, all our infrastructure would crumble at the same time once an APT decides to go all in. At least here we get a preview of how bad things could get.
if(temp > 5) return;