Same (an outage) happened to the US military commissary system https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-09-01/army-cid-inve...

I was hoping there would be more discussion about the overlap of these two events.

The overlap between those two events is that digital security sucks ass and that attacks are much easier to mount in an era of agents.

I can see advantages to collating data for both organizations, but to it just raises the question, once again, of why simple appliances are connected to the Internet.

That, and why there's not a company VPN in between.

These industrial networks are often not internal to a single company, sometimes by necessity. They also are often installed in places with inherent connectivity difficulties, so sometimes you are bridging weird networks that limit what is possible just to get the signal out.

These aren't consumer fridges with wifi. The situation on the ground is significantly more complex. There are a lot of embedded sensors and control systems in supply chains in order to minimize waste.

Because a main user of this is the third-party HVAC contractor, and there's a operational cost to getting him set up on the grocer's VPN. (He has thousands of clients, that's in aggregate a lot of customers that would need to give him VPN access. He will do whatever the client asks of him, but he will bill accordingly.)

1. There's nothing simple about a commercial HVAC install, especially across a national chain.

2. Because they think (rightly or wrongly) that the benefits of monitoring and ease of maintenance and their contractor having direct access to the data outweigh the risks.

3. They think it outweighs the risk because IOT has been socially normalized, creating the wide perception that no, it's not that bad.

They almost certainly have insurance for this kind of event, and their insurer will almost certainly think real hard about the pros/cons of this, and will adjust rates accordingly. The grocer is free to take those rates into account when deciding on whether their next store will have an IOT HVAC.

I came here for this very discussion. Shame more investigation was not done on this story.

Why the fuck are those fridges even networked!?

None of the supermarkets were managed by Commander Adama, apparently.

Centralized maintenance and monitoring?

It seems like the sort of thing you’d do in-store and firewalled from the internet.

You’d have to pay competent local staff for that.

How do you think grocery stores worked pre internet?

You're going to have to convince VC and PE to give up the massive profits they're raking in.

Lots of things worked pre-internet that now rely on internet in ways that would be rather chaotic and messy to undo.

They were paying competent local staff pre-internet.

"That, like, costs money, man. The accounting department said there was a 1-in-100 year chance of this happening if we didn't shell out, so we didn't." - the CEO, probably.

The article didn't say they weren't.

Monitoring makes sense, but it feels like it makes no sense at all to allow that kind of remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves.

Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.

> remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves

These are minimum wage workers - they don't have bean bags in the nap room, employee massages and stock options.

Supermarkets don't staff HVAC/fridge repairmen. There are separate companies they pay to do this.

Right: and someone from that company can come out and do maintenance when the monitoring indicates it's necessary

When, say, your internet craps out, would you rather your ISP try to resolve the problem, or schedule to send a tech out to your home before they start working on fixing the issue?

Groceries see HVAC in the same way. If they can get their issue addressed or diagnosed by their HVAC contractor without him having to schedule and physically travel to their site, they'd prefer him to solve/start solving the problem immediately. Time is money and the faster the tech can diagnose the problem, the faster he can get on fixing it.

And yes, the prevalence of these systems means that many HVAC techs have the ability to turn off their customers' air conditioners/fridges. They don't use it maliciously, because that would be actual suicide for their business.

---

Source: A close friend of mine runs an HVAC business (~8 employees) doing residential and commercial installs, repairs, and maintenance.

Makes sense but monitoring doesn't mean you have to have remote control of power.

"Utility has alerted us to an upcoming brown-out in a region impacting 40 stores. Cool everything down a few extra degrees in preparation."

A phone call from the HVAC company and physical thermostat dial (in a locked cabinet to prevent incompetent/malicious employees tampering with it) seems a safer solution.

Some grocery stores - and this is probably far more common in France - have no staff overnight.

I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.

And when it happens at 3 in the morning? And when those people are in a meeting 10 miles down the road?

Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.

That might justify a temperature probe in a dumb fridge. This smells of a salesman being here not an engineer though.

And centralized food destruction.

To monitor when something like this happens...

So you can get a notification when the milk expires.

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.

They could just use connected temperature probes though. no need to connect the power supply of the damn compressor to the internet.

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.

Have you ever had to manage any of these things or are you just guessing?

You don't need to network the fridge though... You just need a networked sensor...

That's assuming you just need to maintain a static temperature, which probably isn't the case.

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.

Routine service and maintenance doesn't require net connectivity to schedule.

Agreed. I was just addressing that it's not exceedingly rare to need to get a tech out on site to address something. Should the manager be on top of this, checking temps on all the cases every day? Absolutely, but I can see the argument for a more automated system of monitors/alarms that can get a tech dispatched before the manager has even noticed the problem.

Not all issues are routine.

So we schedule service, and then we throw away all the food anyway because the problem cannot be addressed remotely.

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...

Sure there is.

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.

Wait until people living north of Chicago learn that their thermostats are remotely controlled, when it's -20F outside.

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.

Who benefits from chaos? There is a war raging in Europe, maybe start there

Exactly. This is fifth generation warfare.

Unrestricted warfare is a book more people read to be aware of

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.

I think that's exactly what happened. A kid found out (via an LLM or otherwise) that fridges' temperature were remotely controlled, probably with lax security (or no security at all) and decided to play with it.

It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control; a supermarket is a place where there are always people, it's not a base on Mars. And even if a remote is needed, it should probably not go further than the manager's office.

> It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control

I don’t know to what degree control is needed, but remote supervision of cold holding temperatures is good to make sure food doesn’t spoil. Most places that don’t have networked fridges have staff manually logging the cold holding temperatures to make sure things are working.

Again, though, I don’t know about making changes though.

In this case it's not like the devices were turned off, they were put on "defrost" which means heating up to 50°C (122°F). Why would you need the ability to remotely set all your fridges to defrost??

One possibility is that it’s maybe useful for the fleet operator to be able to remotely update firmware and the attacker used that.

The other, more likely, answer is that there’s a diagnostic mode that allows raw control of the system and no one bothered to require physical presence to enable service mode.

With remote firmware update capability, at attacker could easily brick the entire fleet. With just service access it could be possible but would be more complex.

I remember having to do this every few hours 25 years ago when working at a store part-time as a student.

Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.

15 years ago a retail chain i worked for had all their HVAC thermostats centrally managed by corporate. This isn't new and it is stupid but how else do you ensure shareholders keep every possible cent of profit (in the short term of course)

Superstore had a few episodes about the consequences of that.

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...

You assume there must be some nation state behind it.

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

Manufacturer abdicated saying those models are no longer supported and so not receive security updates.

Wonderful world we live in where refrigerators and cars also become e-waste because a manufacturer gets tired of patching them

> 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.

> why now?

Probably to inflict pain on the life of the voters so they can blame the government and manipulate the 2027 French presidential election in April. Maybe just a test.

Same as the high velocity train being sabotaged again just in the Spain national day. Hybrid war.

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. A high velocity train wagon was set on flames today, blocking the railway and creating chaos among thousands of passengers that try to return home after the holidays. Why?, because it makes the government look bad, and inflicts maximum pain on people, just when Spain is also about to celebrate elections. Angry people vote the loudest voices.

In France this benefits the pro-Russian Lepen's party with the "government is a disaster but we will make them pay for your suffering". Page "16" of the manual. In the end is all the same handbook all around the planet.

Just by the record, EU has just approved the biggest packet of sanctions against Russia so yes, they know. The more desperate grows Russia, the more this will happen. Until it will stop, suddenly, for no reason.

> 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.

> On the bright side I'm sure the manufacturer

I initially misread it as "On the bright side, I'm the manufacturer..." (and earn a nice profit).

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055304

Comments moved thither. Thanks!