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?
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.
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?
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.