this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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What's missing from this report is more detail on how exactly this attack went down. Did the attackers compromise supermarket networks and manipulate the fridges through lateral movement within the network; or were the fridges accessible from the open internet? If the latter is the case (and there's a non-zero likelihood they were): why the fuck?
Because, despite us being in the Information Age, and computers surrounding us everywhere, only a very small portion of the population consider that learning how they work may be useful.
I'm sure if more people learned about how computers work, AI wouldn't be a thing because they'd realize that computing-based tasks can already be automated without LLMs.
Tell that to my developer colleagues who are busy defining "skills" for the AI to do the mundane things our tools could already do. It may waste huge amounts of electricity, water and money, make us dependent on American megacorporations, cause their skills to atrophy, and be a gamble every time, but at least they don't have to read the manual.
I assume because of the monitoring cloud-based IoT thing from Danfoss fridges were so comfortable to use. Ok, you don’t need it so often, but hey it’s a cool IoT feature.
They really put a "let everything rot" button in there?
Yes, they did. Keep the defrost button pressed.
It might not rot, they set it to 50°C, so some things might get sous vide 😅
I had a picture of the device since I was curious, but I spotted at Walmart, and some other stores, a Cellular/Wifi/BT gateway that was branded by some company providing facilities services. As far as I can tell, the device was intended to provide secure connectivity to some service provider. I found a similar device in the freezer section of another store.
I imagine that there is remote control/remote monitoring of all the freezers or other on-premise machinery (which, is a perfectly sound thing to do), but if the central provider doesn't take security seriously, and stay on top of their systems operations, can easily be the target for any kind of attacks.
More practically, I suspect that everyone involved has insurance whose cost is much less than ongoing proactive security + maintenance of their systems, which is why these incidents don't seem to instantly put these companies out of business.
Stuff like eWon routers are everywhere, they're basically openvpn (thank you open source devs, of course we won't contribute shit or share any of the money you made us) devices that connect to a bunch of central servers and allow you to tunnel to them. Compromise such a system and you're spoiled for choice on what to hit.
Guess...