Re:Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspecte...
by toss1 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:51AM
(#50352733)
Thank you, very informative, and having had to support biz/network software I wrote, entirely credible.
So, how can this be solved? Ideally for the long-term, but also for the current interim state — we have a known attack vector costing millions, known exposed, and need to do something.
Short term, seems like disable defrost or other critical vectors? IDK the architecture, so IDK how difficult it would be to add a local interlock or override for critical instructions that would damage the whole contents, so the local manager must also confirm "READY TO DEFROST"?
Long term, seems the only solution is to rearchitect a truly secure solution with secure access controls, locked-down to a limited set of IP and MAC addresses, all traffic encrypted, etc. Plus a deep evaluation of the sets of instructions that could be catastrophic, and adding requirement for local confirmation/override to execute those functions.
It also seems there is a lot of available improvement in the UI so regular Joe-managers could use it. Even if they see "CHECK SENSOR AA-123", their eyes glaze over because they just see it as the gateway to a hellish maze they don't want to enter. Adding layers of actually informative error messages and walk-them-thru steps to fix it seems well within our technology. It'd probably require an additional local mini-PC on each site, but could save millions.
If this gets scaled to a whole country, when most of our food supply is Just In Time, it is no longer a prank.
So, how can this be solved? Ideally for the long-term, but also for the current interim state — we have a known attack vector costing millions, known exposed, and need to do something.
Short term, seems like disable defrost or other critical vectors? IDK the architecture, so IDK how difficult it would be to add a local interlock or override for critical instructions that would damage the whole contents, so the local manager must also confirm "READY TO DEFROST"?
Long term, seems the only solution is to rearchitect a truly secure solution with secure access controls, locked-down to a limited set of IP and MAC addresses, all traffic encrypted, etc. Plus a deep evaluation of the sets of instructions that could be catastrophic, and adding requirement for local confirmation/override to execute those functions.
It also seems there is a lot of available improvement in the UI so regular Joe-managers could use it. Even if they see "CHECK SENSOR AA-123", their eyes glaze over because they just see it as the gateway to a hellish maze they don't want to enter. Adding layers of actually informative error messages and walk-them-thru steps to fix it seems well within our technology. It'd probably require an additional local mini-PC on each site, but could save millions.
If this gets scaled to a whole country, when most of our food supply is Just In Time, it is no longer a prank.