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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.
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.
Depending on the way the corporate network is setup, you might need one of these at each location: does a grocery chain have a corporate-wide VPN already? I assume not because then you could avoid this whole situation by never exposing the hardware to the Internet. Even then, locking down odd hardware in a subnet would be a good choice.
It's often said that the "S" in IoT stands for security, and it's not really wrong, but the way we define "security" does manage to be difficult to implement on embedded devices. "Oh just use TLS" isn't trivial: most configurations there will need certs that get updated regularly. Do you even trust your CA to remain on the approved lists indefinitely? Will your choice of RSA-4096 still be acceptable for the life of the unit (say, 50 years)? What's your plan for post-quantum cryptography on a device built in 2003?
Your fridge also suddenly needs a good clock source to check the certificate time limits: now you need to set that on the device, potentially every time it loses power. NTP works, but isn't foolproof or even secure in most deployments. These things aren't trivial, unfortunately.
In practice, a large, long-lived SSH key signed by corporate would work fine, but none of the normal tech stack is really setup for this today unless your users like command lines. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's not in the normal wheelhouse for technicians who specialize in wrenches.
I've never worked for one, but I assume they do for the POS system, along with other ERP system access for inventory, receiving, accounting, and so on. They should probably have multiple subnets per site for the sake of isolation, but that's a bit of a hassle to combine with a VPN and may not have been done.
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