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- Hacker News
- 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.
by lucasluitjes - I worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.
These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage. One example might be that due to shifting customer patterns and products, you might want a certain refrigerator case to be kept colder with a narrower temperature range. Another example is for Demand Response: when a brownout may occur, the utility companies want people to lower their load, which, in the case of supermarkets, means turning off lights, increasing the thermostat on the AC, turning off dehumidifiers, etc.
One notable story from that time: this was during the 2008 economic crash, and the company went from hiring to laying off within a week. A group of technicians were working on a refrigerator compressor system and were told by security to stop what they were doing and immediately exit the building. They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
by chromaton - Looks like that specific vulnerability was found this summer, disclosed in coordination with the vendor and at least some models were patched [0] (unclear if all models were), but from early reports:
- they either didn't warn their customers this was a critical security patch, - many of these fridges/freezers were directly accessible on the internet with their own 3G/4F SIM cards without further protection!
Crazy stuff
[0] https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
by cataflam - Not sure if it's related but there was a vuln published in August for the freezers in the article
https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...
maybe groups have been looking for targets to use it on?
by nemomarx - This is pretty interesting as the Danfoss vulnerability was suspected to be related to a similar situation that occurred across US military bases in late August 2026.
https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...
Could this be the same group? Or someone inspired by reading that article? Or just entirely unrelated?
by bronco21016 - > 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".
by renyicircle - Was just talking to a lab tech at a hospital.
It seems that some of the newer lab machines require internet access because you can't run lab tests unless you have a paid subscription to use the machine. No credits on the subscription, no tests.
I mention this b/c a lot of commenters here are saying "but why would you ever hook up a freezer to the internet??"
I find that type of comment fascinating as many of the people on HN worked for firms that built the technology required to use internet based subscription models.
by alexpotato - If you believe some of the emerging comments out there - try "Danfoss CVE" - you'll see that some of the suspects are 15-20 year old controllers like the Danfoss SM800 (EOS 2021) and SC355 (EOS 2016).
Why don't they just--- no margin. But there were CVEs-- no margin.
The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class has nothing in terms of luxuries like security reviews and gear replaced on cycles and other basics taken for granted.
But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
Secure-by-default laws will eventually help, but there's always going to be groaning infrastructure particularly in commodity industries, and we still haven't onboarded most of the disaffected men to the Internet that will commit innumerable more hacks and disruptions.
by 9x39