I Think the Military Commissary Freezers Were Hacked
29 points by df
29 points by df
I’m not trying to be a buzzkill, and I’m not saying that a cyber attack shouldn’t be written off. In fact, I would say that is a very likely possibility
But just as likely to me, is someone at the central command intending to select only one unit to defrost. And selecting all of them.
By the way, that suggests accident. It could also be an insider attack (disgruntled employee).
Regardless, the fact that this was allowed to happen should really trigger an investigation into why these food critical installations even needed to be connected to the Internet in the first place, and writable.
Or selected the production system instead of the test environment. A bug is also possible.
I'm not sure a country with access to that system would trigger than now. Doing it in times of active war would have tangible benefits against bases but even more against remote bases or deployed units (like ships). Now I'm wondering if any of these has been affected; we probably won't know right away.
The US is in an active war now, with ships deployed far from supply depots for longer than usual time spans. Seems like a perfectly fine time for Iran to do something like this, if they could do it to the relevant parts of the supply chain.
It seems like Iran would be a more likely culprit than China, considering the current war. Especially with the logistical food problems the US navy is having, any disruption in that area would benefit Iran.
Yeah Iran does seem like the most likely suspect and it is a legitimate, though low-impact, target. It's also a good example to point to for the need to improve cybersecurity because you can easily point to it and say "Do you really think that your power plant is a lower priority target than a fucking freezer?".
Or as it's custom with such things, some teen.
Examples:
Or it wasn't. Just feels odd to consider any option "likely".
I get the Iranians hacking freezers at bases in the Middle East - doing so would have a direct impact on the war - but hacking them in mainland USA doesn't make sense to me. It exposes their hacking capability while not having a meaningful impact on US supply chains.
Like burning a zero-day on a non-strategic target.
Funny coincidence, my neighbour's deep freezer also stopped working out of the blue last week. I'm afraid to ask him if it was connected to the net...
An army marches on its stomach, so if you get rid of the food from the stomach then they can't march at all. Or something. Anyway, what an interesting and fun security incident, although I wouldn't like it to happen to where I get my eggs and milk from, for sure.