Industrial equipment such as refrigeration units, long isolated from the internet, are now connected via sensors or remote monitoring systems, Antoine Hautin of cybersecurity consultancy Almond told AFP.
So like, maybe not have the sensors and remote monitoring? Why does this even need to be a thing? Grocery stores got along fine with out remote monitoring for a long time. I dunno, I not a refrigeratorologist.
I think remote monitoring could be useful. E.g. “Fridge X in store Y has failed, we can book an engineer”. However even then: it should be secure within the network and not accessible outside it. And the other issue is monitoring is fine, but why on earth do you need remote access to defrost a unit? That is just asking for trouble.
I bet cost cutting is at the centre of this - cheaper to have one person able to “manage” problems off site than having people available local to all the stores. But when you save money like this, you need to spend money to ensure it’s secure. And often they don’t because all these companies cut all costs all the time to boost share prices. And that includes competent people in IT and networking. Probably outsourced to some conglomerate that doesn’t give a fuck.
Agreed it could be useful, but counterpoint, I used to work in a local only grocery store back in the 90s. We had temp gauges hanging from the evaporator units blowing in the cooler, and temp gauges in the customer facing side as well. We’d look at them, and if they’re out of range, we’d call the maintenance company. I mean, stores are staffed by people, even downsizing, someone has to go into the walk in fridges and freezers to put stock away from shipments and restock customer facing areas. I dunno, seems like a solution that doesn’t have a problem.
Or even better, if you have remote monitoring don’t give it remote control abilities. This is something that should be physical/on-fridge only. The monitoring should just be there so you can track the temperature for compliance and saftey
Probably some bored script kiddie. The refrigerators admin panels are internet facing and use admin as password and the actual date as password. You can find a bit more than 4000 of them online in france on shodan.
One thing I find confusing in these stories is that it’s multiple chains, meaning their entire collection of these refrigerators are exposed to access en masse.
The manufacturers are saying its because the supermarkets didn’t update the firmware on these models - probably true. However on top of that is a more broad issue: Why are such systems accessible in the first place? Are they internet facing (which is mad) or is there a flaw in the supermarkets private networks or is there a flaw in the access these refrigerators need out of the network?
So often it’s very basic network security that massively contributes to the problem. Firmware absolutely should be kept up to date, but these things can be kept secure without updates by just not being accessible. That would ideally be the local store only and a physical closed network, or if running a chain then that means keeping the chains network properly secure. It’s always multiple layers of mistakes and bad decision that leads to this kind of chaos.
Curious what the motive was. Just to see if they could?
As usual, I suspect Russian shenanigans.
