Maybe they shouldn't.
You actually do want to be able to monitor them remotely, like most industrial/commercial refrigeration, to detect failures faster and more reliably. They should still be at least secured with normal auth/autz in addition to perimeter security, though.
If I can know when a fridge failed within the hour (even at night) then I can also dispatch a technician same/next day more easily.
Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.
- The device’s control has a radio transmitter that emits its readings, but no receiver. Listen for those messages to monitor it but there’s not a physical path to reply to it.
- The device’s controller writes a database or message queue. Its code never reads from that source. Monitors listen to those messages.
And many, many similar methods with the same core concept: the item transmits its status but doesn’t have a method to receive replies. You just have to commit to using any one of those thousands of mechanisms.
Read-only is a strong control with lots of solid implementations.
But to address your specific point:
being able to monitor does not ( or at least should not ) automatically equal put it on the web
Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.
This line suggests the units themselves were targeted individually with a hack:
> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.
But the problem with networked devices spread across tens of thousands of pretty much unguarded locations, surrounded by unvetted employees, but taking orders form a central location is that there is no such thing as "not online". They'll talk to the management server used to set up the nightly defrost schedules across the fleet. Even if they are in an isolated VLAN, it's always one step away from someone connecting a Pi to that network and off they go online. There's only so much zero-trust, NAC/802.1x and segmentation can do when some devices will be too old to support these and their network will be the entry point to the management server, then to the whole fleet.
I'm honestly very surprised that a couple of things things haven't happened yet: the central server for managing these fleets getting hacked and allowing access to the entire fleet, and/or the companies realizing that the only way to limit the reach of an attack is to physically not have the hardware needed to do remote control.
This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.
Then again when was the last time you opened your freezer hundreds of times during one day, letting humid air in and building ice at an accelerated rate? These units actively heat up the back of the freezer (evaporator plate) nightly to quickly melt the ice without warming up the food.
There is no reason to directly trigger it remotely but they probably work on a customizable schedule, to account for different store opening times, timezones, or freezer size and model. The hackers could target that schedule to make the defrost last longer.
Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to connect any home appliances to the Internet. I have a limited number of Zigbee devices, and they are managed through Home Assistant and can't access the Internet.
I see such idiots daily, in all venues of life: the world is simply really full of dumbfucks.
It's simply how things are and we shouldn't be afraid of pointing it out.
Adjust: possibly, withing a range
Shutting down: Big no no
I have a smart fridge and washer. I won't name names. But for several years they were never connected or online at all (unless they was compromised and I didn't know). I connected them and one of the first updates included in the washer was changing the default wash cycle from something like 110 minutes to 46 or something. I don't remember all the values if I'm honest.
There are executives who have spreadsheets and charts of how much water that saved per household over varying periods of time. How much it would save with greater adoption. And the unsaid message, or maybe they'll be explicit, of how many people are going to face tragic water supply issues in the future.
It's a powerful message, even if we know it's cyncical and calculated to push not just washers, but firmware security systems and institutions to govern those systems.
And yes, compromised systems can also be used to build zombie networks to push horrible content.
I feel horrible that this critically important surface issue of water supply is used to push other agendas. I honestly wish I could do other work not related to it.
Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.
More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:
I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.
In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.
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?
- 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...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/eam-jaishankar-warns-...
I wonder if this attack is some kind of early warning about capabilities of disruptive forces.
Lots of industrial controls haven’t been updated since they were deployed in the 90’s. “And why should they be? If it ain’t broken…” Well, because they’re freaking broken!
So I’m glad that this happened in a tangible, public way people can easily understand without it involving something much more drastic. If your family asks about this, explain that you’re glad no one blew up a gas pipeline… yet.
Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most. There have been numerous examples of lax security in this area already and a fleet of rogue cars or delivery trucks could obviously cause huge amounts of damage, injury, and loss of life.
There's a legacy of openness in car tech and software that was never designed with robust security and isolation of critical components in mind. I've heard that this has started to change more recently and that's reassuring if true. But this still feels like an area with far too little regulation or oversight given the past choices of vehicle manufacturers and far too much rush to connect everything up remotely even for minor convenience reasons.
In some cases there also now seems to be legally mandated connectivity for things like automated emergency calls after an accident. This should at least have a genuine benefit in the unfortunate situation that it's needed - but until vehicle security looks more like Fort Knox than a sandcastle it might still prove to be a bad choice in the end.
Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. Find the cellular modem fuse and pull it. You now have a modern, but fully offline car. Security aside, connected cars are absolutely awful for your privacy.
Very few things should be networked, or at the very least, not with any sort of control. I can't even blame the average person anymore for not being as aware about technology, unless there's some sort of aggression or dismissive responses when they're informed of the risks or potential risks. Software developers at this point may very well end up being as despised as lawyers or bankers, for not broadly enough condemning this sort of technological creep, but for being that guy smugly saying something about firmware updates ... on a refrigerator.
Will they never learn?
The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.
Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.
Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.
If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.
* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.
Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.
Meanwhile you can use analog gauges if you need perfect max temperature monitoring.
That's what always pisses me off about this. Someone brought up "Hey, if we connect this to the internet to enable that feature, someone will start hacking fridges and hurting our customers, and I don't think the stupid page with a temperature graph on it is worth that tradeoff", and some ass told them to get over it and implement it.
Raymond Chen used to write about feature development at Microsoft, specifically how every single new feature idea started from a negative position, since it requires support and testing and engineering and thought, and has future repercussions, so it's often not a good idea to just add box checking features.
Microsoft believed this in the 90s. For things like UI functionality. That's the effort and thought and restraint required to have a consistent UI, for things to be thought out.
Somehow, between then and now, the industry threw all that thought away, and now everything has 400 totally unused, half implemented, utterly broken features.
Why are we here? "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.
To boot, refrigeration has been wholly automatic for decades. It literally runs itself. It doesn't need any network connectivity other than to say "I work" and "I'm broken" and that's it. Allowing control commands to be sent over the network is, yet again, just asking for trouble.
Source: https://www.visitflanders.com/en/discover-flanders/culinary-...