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Notes -
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-cyberattack-forced-115141288.html
This is a poetry of stupid and the hackers are the least guilty party here. Lets start with the obvious. Why freezers needs to be visible, why do they need to be remotely managed, why is not this done on dedicated internal network, why do they need firmware updates. How did we get to the point where a device that should be pid controller, compressor and alarm can be hacked.
To make you feel better - all of your nice EVs are also permanently connected and I doubt that there is air gap between the infotainment and the firmware of the battery pack. Someday someone will be able to accelerate or set on fire EV remotely. And probably soon.
My house has smart lights in it. I decided to try pairing them to my phone in case I have time to ever want to change their color one day.
After connecting the app tells me some of the bulbs need a firmware update. Light bulbs need firmware updates these days, apparently.
So yes of course supermarket refrigeration systems also need firmware updates.
Light bulbs shouldn't need firmware updates either.
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One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens.
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I despise this framing, and it is obviously false. The most guilty party in any situation is always the actual guilty party. When a women walks down a dark alley in skimpy clothing and gets raped, the most guilty party is the rapist. When a farm sets out an unattended stand with fresh produce and a box to put money in and someone comes and steals everything, the most guilty party is the thief. When a supermarket doesn't put locks on their toothpaste and someone comes and shoplifts a bunch of toothpaste, the most guilty party is the shoplifter. When someone puts refrigerators on the internet and they get hacked, the most guilty party is the hacker.
Yes, you need to be vigilant and aware that bad people exist and take precautions to protect yourself from them. If someone is in a low trust environment where bad people are prevalent, it is irresponsible and negligent not to take precautions, and anyone who fails to do so does share some of the blame for the obvious outcome where the bad people harm them. But they share less than half of the blame, because if the bad people didn't exist then obviously no harm would happen at all and the precautions wouldn't be necessary. There is a finite amount of blame to distribute, and the majority always belongs with the bad people who actually do bad things.
Yes. The sysadmin. IT security with minimal exceptions[1] always had serious component of victim blaming in the 90s.
The difference with the rest of your scenarios is that in IT there was never trust which could be betrayed. Everyone knew from the beginning that everyone is out to get you. There was never presumption of safety on the internet.
So a better analogy is who is to blame when a soldier dies on the battlefield - the enemy shooter or the soldier that didn't take cover?
[1] Technically illiterate activists in the third world and the likes.
You're missing the point. Low trust societies are worse than high trust societies, because even when you take all of the appropriate security measures, those measures inherently come with costs and friction that wouldn't be necessary if there weren't untrustworthy people around. The actual perpetrators are the people directly inflicting all of the costs, both the damages when they get away with something and the security costs when people move to stop them. The naive people are indirectly responsible for the costs caused by insufficient security measures. If they weren't naive OR if there weren't scumbags around, they wouldn't get sabotaged so drastically, but no matter how cynical they are there's nothing they can do to prevent the security costs and friction forced upon them by the scumbags. There's a clear asymmetry here.
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction. They're not just some environment, like wandering into the woods and getting mauled by a bear. They're people and thus deserve blame when they inflict harm.
I think you're on to something. A whole bunch of the thoughts I've been thinking about posts from the last couple weeks about the ongoing Lindsey Clancy drama, AI doomerism, European Diplomats, the Cornel 7, and Spiderman: Brand New Day, all seem to be converging on a similar conclusion and I really want to explore in an effort post but it's already late and I really ought to call it a night.
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I don't fully buy this. Telecoms were originally bult completely unsecured until phreakers ruined it. And even up until 2024 or so people could put whatever number they wanted on the caller id. Email was largely the same, totally unsecured, until the spam waves forced the mass lockdown.
There was the presumption of safety on the internet when it was a place only accessible to elites and nerds. And maybe now that's over, especially with the shitholes of the world getting hooked up. Indian cubercriminals act with absolute impunity, and nobody does a thing about it.
I'm not sure if we can ever get the trust back, but drone striking a few fraud factories would be a great start
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Feels like every major tech news should have the accompanying HackerNews thread just for more industry context or related info.
HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055304 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058569
This is an interesting connection for essentially the same hack in the past: https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hacked-the-commissary
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Having worked as a refrigeration tech before, I may have some insight- this was almost certainly done for management and monitoring. Defrost cycles are very important to keep freezers from bricking themselves, and danfoss controllers are very common as an alternative to a mechanical time clock- because they’re fully programmable to the conditions of the specific box.
Why they were connected to the internet is probably because corporate wanted to be able to mess with it without sending someone in person. The stated reason was probably so they could set passwords but in reality it was to make in house maintenance personnel’s lives easier.
There's a lot of value in things like alerts, too. Being able to send someone an text message or even call someone when a glycol loop herps the derp can be a 10k-100k dollar value proposition, and pulling good logging data about current draw can give you warning months before actual death about a failing motor or compressor.
That said, the idea of inbound open ports for management is mind-boggling, even for hardware in the 2000s era. Even before you get to the security ramifications, it's just an absolute nightmare trying to get fifty sites to stick with static IP addresses, inform you when changing ISPs or modifying firewall configurations, or your DDNS provider changes literally anything. I know OT has worse practices than IT, but this one is pretty mind-boggling.
Forget setting up VPNs. Buy and configure a single main operational server, have the hardware send regular updates there, move all the heavy lifting and the UI somewhere you can control if and limit firmware updates to message protocols, certificates, and fundamentals. Allow big customers to buy, run, and redirect to their own server if they really need to own everything. Done. Two or three months work for an intern. I hate Everything Is The Cloud, but this is a tailormade situation for just putting things on the cloud.
They had inbound open ports to allow their maintenance managers to change settings store managers were messing with, probably. But why they didn’t take security precautions to prevent that I don’t know. Probably because they’re career hvac techs and it doesn’t occur to them that someone would want a freezer to stop working.
What were the hackers after? Ransom ware?
Seems like pure destruction to me, most likely from a nation state (who else would have motive, means, and opportunity?). Maybe it's retaliation for that Russian bot farm that got blown up?
A practice run for the Chinese hackers who've already infiltrated much of American infrastructure.
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It's still weird that the guy building the web interface would do it, even if he was a career HVAC tech that had gotten pushed into software dev. But it's plausible.
That's a fun thought. Ransomware naively feels a little weird for me. Telling the people they need to pay you gives them a window to replace the controllers (or just turn off internet access and hope you didn't leave a time bomb). But I may be missing an attack vector there, or they might have been working toward the timebomb and just noticed enough devices they got interrupted.
There's some more esoteric options, though. Hitting food supplies is famously one a target for causing political unrest. Just shorting a few of the supermarkets would potentially be a very remunerative option, though it'd be a hilarious way for the hackers to get caught (or lose money). Burning Danfoss itself might be a thing, especially for the more ideological actors -- even if the threat genuinely doesn't exist for their newer products (not a given), there's no way its buyers avoid a security audit, and no way Danfoss avoids a ton of support costs downstream of that, on top of lost goodwill. Political or nationalist drives are always an option, if a goofy one. "Hey, Look At Me" or a personal grudge turned public is just plain dumb, but if any attack could be executed by a script kiddy, this one could.
Not sure some other options.
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Seems to me that the smarter way to do this would be to have a site-to-site VPN between your corporate office and the store's internal network. Then the freezers remain on the "internal" corporate network and aren't exposed to the internet.
This may be shocking to professional software engineers, but most companies do not put systems on a VPN prior to those systems being hacked.
I guess a lot depends on when the system was put together, but as a professional I.T. guy, oof. Of course you put them on the VPN! That's been the sane choice for at least twenty years. If you absolutely, positively can't for some reason, then you at least whitelist the control server at the firewall level and block other traffic to the device.
Now if they were small enough not to have an I.T. department, I'd understand. But more likely I.T. was overruled.
It was probably put together by career HVAC techs who told them to set up communication via a web portal so they could initiate defrosts* on their cellphones, and then set the passwords to their lastnames.
*For those in the back who don't know, commercial freezers are supposed to have an electronic defrost that clears ice off the evaporator so it doesn't inhibit airflow. This attack worked by reprogramming that defrost to never end.
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Yes but that does require more infrastructure. It's also very possible that the units connect to a manufacturer cloud controller on the Internet only on outbound connections, which is typically reasonably secure so long as you use SSL pinning etc, or even on an IPSEC tunnel, but that the cloud controller was itself compromised in some way.
The manual for one of the affected models is available online, see page 11. The idea of a web host running on the hardware controller is... not the worst thing I've ever done, but :
Definitely worse. I was building web-accessible hardware in 2013. This was, to be fair, a couple years pre-Let's Encrypt, and SSL wouldn't have solved this specific problem.
But I still knew better than that.
Early descriptions of the attack have claimed that there was a master password for the device exposed on the same interface (unclear if it's the HTTP or XML), which allowed the control commands through in bulk.
All of these manuals are online for technicians to read.
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Oh my, that is indeed dire.
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Geez, page 60 has a default admin password of 12345... There's a decent chance they just used that and then clicked the defrost button. It's fortunate that the attackers appear to have been unsophisticated, apparently you can also remotely upload new firmware and they don't describe any verification or signature validation.
Or maybe half a step more sophisticated they got VPN creds for the grocery store from a data breach or something, I doubt they were just sitting accessible on the internet. That's the sort of thing Shodan would have flagged years ago.
Yes, all of that stuff is absolutely industry standard- because most of these freezers are worked on by contractors with an end user who don’t know nothing about nothing and they need a default admin password.
Their main competitor is even worse.
The default admin password would be common in normal IT world until 2020: it took a combination of California law (2018's SB-327) and NIST's mandate, along with some questionably-authorized-by-statute contracting pressures, that really made it universal for routers. I'll still see it (or password) on internal-only equipment, including some still-being-sold-as-new Unifi devices.
It's not even necessarily wrong in an environment where you'd expect some intrusion detection, or where the device requires a change on first login. It's just bizarre to do it, and then recommend people forward a WAN directly. This particular attack seems to have depending on another, different 'master' password, so I guess it doesn't even matter, but that's another thing that on its own points to 'reasonable if you're not that concerned about horizontal movement' (common in 2013) and really bad if you have any reason to worry about being the first hop in an infection.
Like, I'd hope they have fail2ban or equivalent set up? But I wouldn't be optimistic.
The competitor being worse makes me really concerned.
You are aware these are freezers, right? Like they're important but they're not holding onto private data or whatever.
Emerson writes the password on the device for technicians to have access to, and Ke2therm uses all fives(no, it can't be changed).
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This system was not designed by IT professionals.
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I can see there being utility for your freezers being on the network - maybe if one of them has a mechanical problem or other fault, having it on the network and reporting to a dashboard somewhere can raise an alarm to get that taken care of.
I would definitely agree that having any of your infrastructure on a network that is accessible from outside of your organization is fucking retarded.
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We had a similar incident of a firmware update bricking Samsung refrigerators. Just a continuation of the trend of "you own nothing" and you need to rent everything and pay service contracts to the vendor. We got hp printers where you don't own the ink cartridge in your hand, but just a subscription contract to allow you to print a certain number of pages. We got subscriptions for heated seats and enabling the maxiumum power of the car.
Doesn't help that these legacy companies have notoriously incompetent software engineering and nonexistent concern for security. Things were real bad well before vibe coding and they'll only get worse.
I watched the Cyberpunk Netfix show and it had a bit about needing to pay a subscription to use your own washing machine. As shown by it locking up on a child when full of his wet school clothes. And the resulting cost of living ends up high enough that a regular non-corpo working mom can barely afford to live. They don't explicitly say the prices were algorithmially determined to be exactly what you can bear, but I'll assume something like that is happening in the setting. That's quite a cynical "late capitalism" take; as appropriate for cyberpunk.
But back in real life they are actually pushing to make something like that sci-fi dystopia real. We're just missing the cool cyber mods and true AI. We get to keep the appliances that lock up.
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Companies that pull this sort of Stierscheiße ought to be charged a 99.5% tax rate on subscription revenues, and have to write the government a thank-you note for the C-suites not spending the rest of their lives at donkey-work in inhospitable climates.
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The issue probably is the cloud accounts, not that they had real ip addresses. Even my mild contempt towards french IT prowess doesn't assume a world in which they will leave them out in the open or allow them NAT traversal. Having the right to install your own server to manage your own devices should be basic ownership. But this is often impossible. Which is really infuriating with the security cameras that needs cloud account in china. Yaay.
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Let's start with something juicy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvp8glg97393o
Couple of starting points - it won't help Trump, chances of uncovering smoking guns that with tank Dems in the eventual records are slim to none. Zero chance she will be stripped of citizenship or her alleged brother deported (cue Alabama joke here). It is not escalation - the escalation was the Trump trial, but as retaliation is quite weak. If democrats obtain trifecta - I wonder what type of further escalation they will figure out.
Personally I find her the most dislikable among the squad, so I won't say I am sad.
I think there is a narrow path that leads to at least a conviction for perjury -- she was actually 18 at the point her father immigrated and the search turns up solid proof of it. In that case, she's have been obligated to apply for citizenship on her own and would have been perjuring herself on various official documents in the decades since.
Despite the chud dreams, I think denaturalization is not likely even in this scenario. But a charge for perjury or some other falsification-of-documents offense is advantageous for the DOJ: easy to try and prove, makes their point.
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Ilhan Omar is my congressional representative and you can inject this news into my veins. Ilhan Omar is essentially immune to electoral challenges despite being one of the most embarrassing politicians in the United States of America. This district will never in a billion years elect a Republican, of course, but she manages to survive even quite strong primary pressure despite her only congressional accomplishments in nearly a decade consisting pretty much entirely of some popular tweets. I've read that she has managed to make herself the nexus of a fairly robust patronage (i.e. grift) network which would fall apart if she left office, this seems as good an explanation as any.
Anyway, the only realistic way she ever leaves office is an actual legal issue that either finally convinces enough Minnesota Democratic Primary voters to drop their loyalty to her, or which makes her ineligible to serve. I'm hoping pretty desperately this investigation finds something. A liberal Washington DC district judge would have needed to sign off on this, so there's obviously some smoke.
Realistically, though I think you're right, it'll probably have approximately the same political impact as the Mar-a-lago raid.
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In what respect? I don't expect charging Ilhan Omar to give Trump a poll boost or his agenda codified by Congress. But it's generally prima facie good to fight. Ilhan Omar is nationally-known, generally disliked, and a bad face for Democrats. Unless Trump way oversteps or overcharges this is a political fight he can win and it will be good for him to win it.
It's been years now but I remember discussing Ilhan Omar here and with others here. The idea that she married her brother and committed immigration fraud was treated as a laughable conspiracy only Fox News-addled partisans would treat as anything more than a joke. Now?
Elsewhere, maybe. I'm pretty sure there were plenty of people here who took the idea seriously, or at least did not consider it laughable.
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So, did she marry her brother to bring him to the United States? It seems very plausible and I'm sure similar things happened all the time prior to 2025. At the same time, conspiracy theories about the personal lives of prominent individuals usually turn out to be fake. I'll confess to wanting to believe, which means extra caution is probably warranted.
In other news Talarico (as per my prediction) has turned up seemingly no worse for wear after a 12 day absence. But... what happened? It's a very strange absence and the official explanation (flu) should be easy to verify if he was receiving medical treatment. IIRC, a right-wing influencer on Twitter claimed to have audio from an employee at a mental health treatment facility in Ohio where Talarico supposedly was being treated after having a mental breakdown. The facility came out today with an official denial. I trust both these accounts very little.
These type of stories almost always turn out to be nothingburgers, but they are definitely fun to think about.
The most parsimonious explanation for Talarico to me seems similar to Biden's campaigns (before it all blew up): you're a Democratic campaign manager, and your candidate turns out to be kind of bad at campaigning. You know the media will essentially do your campaigning for you, and this guy is hurting your internals compared to Generic Democrat every time the public sees his face. So what do you do? Shove the guy in a basement, use the time to coach him like mad, and try to get to Election Day with voters thinking about negatives on Republicans rather than about your guy in particular. Which makes sense given how Talarico was selected ("fuck, we can't run Crockett, what white guys do we have left?"), but I suppose we'll see over the next couple weeks whether the campaign keeps him on ice or tries to get him back out there.
That makes sense.
But it feels like the Democrats missed an opportunity here.
I mean there are TONS of libtarded white guys would who love to be a Senator for Texas. We're talking boy band levels of female adulation here. How come they found this weird heretical, vegetarian, self-loathing, possibly gay guy?
Can't they just find a normal white dude who doesn't post shit about white people being a virus? It's not that hard.
Kinda of like how the Republicans are running Michelle Tafoya in Minnesota or Susan Collins in Maine. You find the best candidate you can for the race you have. There are lots of normal guys who would beat Paxton and would tow the party line once they are in office.
Talarico isn't being the Talafreako allegations. Only way he wins is a big blue wave.
The problem is finding one of those people who a. wants to be a Democrat and b. can slide through the treacherous reefs of Identity Politics Primary Season.
Yeah, I’d expect especially the latter is a rough point. There’s a million Blue Dog Democrats in Texas, usually the reverse of the Thrown In the Pit on the right on something moderate-left on abortion or trans stuff… but there’s no way they’d make it through a primary without getting quisenarted.
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12 days off with the flu is a long time, but not an insanely long time. So far the only evidence I've seen of the Ohio loony bin theory is
A private plane flew from Austin to Ohio and back, and
Someone called the facility with a fake code, and was told the person they were trying to reach was not there and so must have been discharged.
It also doesn't inspire confidence that the supposed, "More recordings from the Lindner Hope Center about to drop in the morning" still haven't dropped. Seems like a more effective line of attack would be to speculate about what * ahem * other infectious diseases he might have contracted on the campaign trail.
They also first tried to get it in the Daily Mail and TheBlaze which should really be quite telling on its own if even some of the lowest evidentary standards imaginable tabloids aren't willing to touch it.
How low quality must your "evidence" be for the daily mail legal team to reject it as too risky of libel?
But it's really important to note here that among the influencer right truth does not matter. It simply does not. They do not give a rat's ass if the story is real, they just want to put Talarico's name next to "mental health crisis". They are the demons from Frieren, words to the influencer right are merely a tool to trick with.
Sometimes if you catch the demons among their group, you'll find they even admit to it.
How do they have lower evidentiary standards than the average media outlet? All I know from the Blaze is their commentary channels, so evaluating evidence doesn't enter the question, but the Daily Mail in particular is definitely one of the world's top performers on this matter, and anyone who says otherwise can only do so because of blinding tribal hatred.
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I talk a lot of crap about the other side (and sometimes MKC when I think he's being a dip), but the reason I feel justified in doing so is a willingness to call fair strikes.
MKC is completely right here. There is a large swath of that group that is just utterly truth-indifferent. They'll say, boost, retweet, any insane shit as long as it gets engagement and clicks and ElonBucks. Candace Owens is the poster child here.
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I think the most likely explanation is that he had a mental health crisis and was admitted to a psychiatric facility. This would explain the lack of access, flu and other explanations would not preclude statements (even if he looked like ass). Even if he was in jail someone would leak it and someone else would be accommodating. Psych stay is strict.
He could have had a really bad medical event theoretically but it's hard to imagine what.
The other two explanations I heard was that it was some sort of 4D chess bait the Republicans thing, or he was secretly flying around doing fundraising (which, why would that stop updates?).
Weird all around.
The denial from the rumored place could be revealing depending on the phrasing, do you have it? I haven't seen it.
When Trump had the rona they insisted on putting him on live tv right away. Part of a politician's job is to show up so the fact he didn't even tweet out a video or something is very sus in my imo.
yeah absolutely the whole thing stinks
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Source
Note, the denial doesn't say he didn't go there, or wasn't evaluated there, just that he didn't get treatment there. It's possible he went and they evaluated him and told him that he doesn't need treatment he just needs to take a week or two of rest and that's what he did.
This seems like a fancy pants kinda place so their risk tolerance and procedures may be different but usually once you've seen someone (and evaluation and recommendations would likely be considered treatment for this purposes) you can't comment at all.
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"We evaluated him and he received treatment at a legally different subsidiary organization in the same building" is the kind of thing I half expect whenever I read the news.
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I never got a satisfactory account of why Hillary collapsed with a seizure on 9/11 at the height of the 2016 campaign. The official story was pneumonia, carefully elaborated as the definitely non-contagious pneumonia when her method of showing face was a quick public appearance with kids. It was a screaming cover-up. And yet what was there to cover up? Ten years later Hillary seems fine.
Actually, in the same vein, it's also bizarre that Biden was diagnosed with cancer immediately after leaving office, but definitely not while he was in office. I guess in this case it's spread to his bones (quite painful) and they believe he will die with it, so it's not quite the same disappearing flu.
Yeah I remember that too. It was weird.
But I have to think the stress of flying around the country, keeping weird hours, meeting hundreds of people, giving speeches, being attacked in the media, etc... would probably make most people break down physically and emotionally. For Hillary, her problem was that she never built up her chops in the minor leagues. She was never a super extrovert like Bill, so the crowds stole her energy instead of giving her energy. Most people like her would have gotten weeded out in single A-ball before they even had a chance to blow up in the Big Leagues.
On the other hand, Trump is perhaps the most elite person we've ever seen (certainly at his age) at being able to thrive in chaos. All the 80 year olds I know tire very easily despite having minimal responsibilities.
We often don't understand what makes politicians special. We're disappointed that they are usually midwits, but the good ones are elite in other ways. Simply being able to keep it all together is impressive.
I'm fairly sure that politicians and their staffers are coping with the high energy demands and stress with prescription pills. I think a lot of weird incidents by politicians in public can be explained by this. When you're absolutely fucking exhausted but staying on your feet and performing with stimulants, sometimes the exhaustion can suddenly win and you go down like a puppet that had its strings cut. Literally or metaphorically.
Even ignoring the whole prescription stimulants angle, I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often given:
I have had a little taste of this due to due to extensive travel for work last year. Consecutive days of poor sleep is a recipe for strange and sudden health issues.
They can get takeout at any of the many national chains and get something pretty consistent and okay. Home cooked is out of the question though.
Retail employees at a busy place get more face to face exposure to random people than a politician. Sure they don't shake hands all the time but hand sanitizer exists and the biggest risk is airborne illness.
Sleep deprivation and stress definitely is true, though idk how much that actually happens on the campaign trail. I guess it really depends on how well the politician can catch naps while on the tour bus.
This is supposedly part of Trump's secret. In terms of food safety, McDonald's is going to be much better than a random diner.
Ironically, eating vegetables is much more likely to make you ill in the short term.
Yeah food safety is very unintuitive. You're much more likely to get sick from eating salad than from sushi
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Here's what JFK was on according to ChatGPT. This is Michael Jackson level pharmacological assistance.
I still want to know what the Biden cocktail was.
I will say this. Medical ethnics are actually pretty good in that we're not getting tons of leaks about the drugs politicians are taking.
Placenta?
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I mean I have personal knowledge of a few politicians and it is usually exactly what you'd expect - people using cocaine because of course. Sometimes Adderall.
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Grandiose narcissism apparently offers some sort of 'shield' to keep external stressors from being internalized.
Sociopathy is probably more extreme than that, in both 'positive' and negative ways.
Yeah, it's likely adaptive in some ways. If you're building a society, the correct amount of dark triad types in the gene pool is > 0.
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