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They had their warning from similar attacks a few weeks ago. Whoever was stupid enough not to pull the plug on this interface deserves the losses. From the costs for the freezer contents, they could have hired even a pricy security specialist.

OP's name checks out.

Maybe we should stop putting appliances on wifi? Like, for everyone everywhere?

imagine having a freezer that's susceptible to a cyber attack. Why the fuck is it connected to the internet? All it needs is a thermostat. The closest thing to a "smart feature" that might benefit is the ability to send a notification if power fails or temperature falls below a set value, neither of which should be hackable by an outside party.

Stop fucking connecting everything to the stupid internet. Everything should be offline first.

The first and foremost sign of intelligence is the ability to learn. Somehow, those supermarket owners seem to lack this important trait.

Stop connecting shit to the internet, this is not a difficult problem to fix.

They’re sitting exposed to the public internet with a well known and super basic password. If your shit is on Shodan, you better know in detail the multiple layers of protection in use. Today’s date is not a password.

I think the takeaway here is how lucky these supermarkets have been. Any threat actor who’s organized would recognize the potential here and work to establish a proper foothold in the organization and try to pivot to corporate or payment networks. Instead they’re just turning off the refrigerators.

YTF does a refrigerator need to be on net control??? Isn't it a set once and forget it device? Maybe to monitor it to report a failure.. but to CONTROL it???

Boy this is hard to understand.

👏Stop 👏 making 👏 everything 👏 connect 👏 to 👏 the 👏 internet👏

I work for the food industry, in automation. Our whole factory is connected. To the point that from my office, I can control most of the factory machines. From my office, from my laptop that needs to be connected through an ethernet cable to one of the tech network of the factory.

If I want to connect from another device, I need to set up a vpn with credentials and an authorised IP.

The only way to access our tech network from the outside is stealing my credentials and then ask some of my colleagues to authorise a device and IP for my credentials, something highly suspicious that would raise a lot of alarms.

I'm not going to say that a system like this is infallible but turns an attack like this extremely unlikely. This is how you should have your systems "connected". Not through a login portal exposed to the damn internet.

Maybe not everything needs to be on the internet.

Why these on network with outside access?

We bought a new Liebherr refrigerator, without a water connection and more importantly, no Wi-Fi connection.

You mean to tell me that none of these people thought to disconnect them the first time?

you would think people owning these stores might have prepared for this by not having those fridges online anymore...

Looks like people didn't learn any lessons from the past cyber-attack. Well, these kinds of attacks will continue as long as users don't take corrective measures !

The question isn't so much, "Why were these on the internet?", so much as, "Why were these not securely connected?"

At my last job, our AWS resources were firewalled off, only accepting connections from our internal VPN. To get on that, you had to be coming from the IP of an office or a DevOps team member's home IP.

The local firewalls could have only allowed traffic to the freezer VLAN from the remote monitoring IP.

And that's just two ideas off the top of my head. If my dumbass can do it, you don't need a high level networking expert to fix this.

So, is it still the outdated firmware they've been warned about and asked to update?