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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.
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.
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.
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).
The IT-world argument is that once you compromise any system on a subnet, you can at least listen to everything else on the subnet, and often attack everything else, too. While it's not entirely true in a modern world, it's pretty close. Conficker is the historical example of a wakeup call here. I get that HVAC techs don't really think that way (and, hell, some IT people don't, a la the 'air-gapped' networks that are really just bad firewall configs), though.
The HVAC argument is that a freezer failure is easily five digit cost of damage, even in the optimistic case where the food is just unsaleable rather than inedible, I can't imagine an expert working that job hasn't seen it. The defrost attack here might not be foreseeable for the average HVAC tech, who might reasonably expect it to 'just have a max timer', but in turn I don't think it's the only or even worst option. I don't have a good model of industrial freezers, but from what happens to consumer air conditioners or freezers when they're stuck short-cycling, I'm guessing that would be Bad, and the sort of failure that requires long technician hours and longer lead times on parts.
The former's actually pretty reasonable, at least if it isn't something stupid like 'password', and NIST recommends it for a lot of devices initial configuration. The latter, I'd like to just have a talk. Holy shit. That's literally worse than the 'some idiot has on his luggage' option.
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