Shop fridges and freezers across Europe hit by fresh suspected cyber-attack
www.theguardian.com
Chains in seven countries say cooling unit temperatures rose overnight in incident similar to hack of French stores

Chains in Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg say fridge temperatures rose overnight, similar to hack of French stores

Supermarket chains in Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg have said the temperatures of their refrigerators and freezers in dozens of stores rose overnight, prompting fears of a cyber-attack similar to one that caused millions of euros of food losses in France.

Sweden’s Coop chain told the daily Aftonbladet on Monday that six of ​its stores ‌had been ​affected, while ICA said it was “aware that a limited ​number of stores were affected by an incident overnight which impacted their refrigeration and freezer systems”.

  • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Wow… where do I start?

    If the department is that important, you pay people to have it manned 24/7. Yes, despite the cost, because it’s that important. Where I work, we have an NH3 cooling system and it is that important, so it’s manned 24/7 locally. But I digress…

    You can collect that data locally, in a machine that is only reading the data (not writing it) and that then relays it to the outside through a VPN to which are connected only the relevant people. That way the machine is kept local, but gives your central the data it asks for. Again, no need for a freezer to be connected to the internet at all.

    Then, to keep it local and safe, if you don’t want to pay someone 24/7 what you do is set a series of setpoints to trigger warnings and alarms that will notify your local team (which, even if it’s not 24/7, should be on call) to intervene in case of need. That way, if your freezer temps raise above the threshold, your local team will get a call automatically and act before even the central knows.

    But ok, let’s say you, for some absurd reason, need to micromanage the freezers of the whole country from the central offices. If that’s the case, and I guess you have a good bunch of freezers to manage then, what you do first and foremost is creating a VPN to connect them all. And with that done, you allow access to it only to a controlled set of devices from which you can manage the freezers and that is separated from your administrative network to keep it safe.

    And yes, all this costs money, but if you are big enough to be a target, you should be spending in security because the bigger you are, the bigger your loss when an attack happens. Looks to me that you’re just trying to save poor corporate some money by cutting corners when it comes to security and well… that’s a valid strategy… until you’re targeted.