Posted On: Monday - November 2nd 2026 7:44PM MST
In Topics: Internets Artificial Stupidity
That picture from a BBC story is from an ICA grocery in Sweden, but this story took, or is still taking, place mostly in France, and in Belgium and Luxembourg too. People are hacking into the control software of supermarket refrigerator/freezers and turning them way up via the defrost function. That probably doesn't encompass all the mayhem being created via this refrigeration control software, made by Danish company Danfoss.
I've been to a Carrefour store in France before, one of the chains mentioned in this story: French supermarket fridges get hacked, heating to 122ยฐF and sparking fires. That was a few weeks back, and more recently it's been Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg.
What do the hackers want? Do they later show up at the stores collecting their favorite foods and buying them for pennies on the Euro? That'd have been a clever plan, but Peak Stupidity reckons this is just another part of the western European protests against... not enough crayons or something?*
No matter what the motive, why would a grocery want a freezer that can be controlled by someone who has no business doing so? Our Artificial Stupidity topic key predates the era of AI, and we've got our share of related posts there bemoaning this stupid idea of "the internet of things". For starters, see The internet of
Is the Internet of Things a thing for lazy people? Too much trouble to go set these units, or take some temperature readings, is it? Sure, having numbers right at your computer is convenient - there could be one guy at corporate headquarters overseeing the functioning of all the stores' refrigeration. Well, do you have to be able to control it too? Once you put all that in the software, could you at least just keep it on some private network, not the whole damn www?
The internet is free, though, in a way. It's easy. Too bad somebody can go change your store freezers' temperature settings and spoil all the food. Keep this sort of stupidity up, and we'll soon have the Internet of Mayhem.
* No, we have an idea what it's really about.
Comments:
Moderator
Tuesday - November 3rd 2026 1:32PM MST
PS: OK, that make's sense, Alarmist. Thanks.
The Alarmist
Tuesday - November 3rd 2026 12:23PM MST
PS
FTE is CorpSpeak for โFull-time Equivalentsโ โฆ an alternative way of looking at headcount since not everyone works a job full time.
๐
FTE is CorpSpeak for โFull-time Equivalentsโ โฆ an alternative way of looking at headcount since not everyone works a job full time.
๐
Moderator
Tuesday - November 3rd 2026 9:15AM MST
PS: Good afternoon, that is, Alarmist. Even in a high-trust society, there are those hackers that want to prove themselves the smartest geeks in the cube-farm or whatever and also have some fun.
They want someone to see their handiwork. However, they don't usually want to destroy like this. I'd think they'd make sure the stores and corporate people realized what was going on and then turned the freezers back on.
Yeah, it's not SO hard to check thermometers or move some controls once in a while. I guess the beancounters did not count on the cost of something like this in their efforts to consolidate to one control desk somewhere, now probably run by AI without anybody. What is an FTE? I figured Field Technician/Engineer?
They want someone to see their handiwork. However, they don't usually want to destroy like this. I'd think they'd make sure the stores and corporate people realized what was going on and then turned the freezers back on.
Yeah, it's not SO hard to check thermometers or move some controls once in a while. I guess the beancounters did not count on the cost of something like this in their efforts to consolidate to one control desk somewhere, now probably run by AI without anybody. What is an FTE? I figured Field Technician/Engineer?
Moderator
Tuesday - November 3rd 2026 9:08AM MST
PS: Good morning, fellows. Yes, I too would have been tempted enough to go check out some of this video, Adam I'm amazed you got to these cameras and that site. As for actually seeing this woman in her own house, the world has been getting pretty weird such that this could happen. If she was a hot young lady, and I had access to the thermostat ...
I take it there was no sound, so you don't know what the stereo ended up doing? I would have done my best to turn her on to The Dead, somehow. Another Deadhead couldn't be a bad thing.
I take it there was no sound, so you don't know what the stereo ended up doing? I would have done my best to turn her on to The Dead, somehow. Another Deadhead couldn't be a bad thing.
The Alarmist
Tuesday - November 3rd 2026 8:49AM MST
PS
Afternoon, all.
I would imagine HQ thought it would be nice to known when one of their fridges was on the fritz โฆ er, this being france, that would be en panne โฆ so the store manager could be alerted to summon one of his imported slave labourers to deal with it. I guarantee you that nobody ever gave a thought to hackers using the weakness to spoil food, because normal people in high-trust societies donโt think like that. In the ideal world, the store manager would either get off his or her fat behind and check the units regularly throughout the day, but that wouldnโt meet the corporate objective to cut as many FTEs as possible, because heaven forbid we employee people.
Cโest la vie !
โฏ๏ธ
Afternoon, all.
I would imagine HQ thought it would be nice to known when one of their fridges was on the fritz โฆ er, this being france, that would be en panne โฆ so the store manager could be alerted to summon one of his imported slave labourers to deal with it. I guarantee you that nobody ever gave a thought to hackers using the weakness to spoil food, because normal people in high-trust societies donโt think like that. In the ideal world, the store manager would either get off his or her fat behind and check the units regularly throughout the day, but that wouldnโt meet the corporate objective to cut as many FTEs as possible, because heaven forbid we employee people.
Cโest la vie !
โฏ๏ธ
Adam Smith
Monday - November 2nd 2026 8:35PM MST
PS: Good evening, Achmed! (& Friends!)
Why are these things online? Why are they not behind a firewall? But more importantly, why are people connecting these things to the internet? Seems like the height of stupidity to me.
A few years back, I stumbled across some sort of website that was a search engine for private/personal devices that were insecurely connected to the internet. So, naturally, I started browsing. It was mostly doorbell & security cameras. Most of them were pointed at the outside world. Busy neighborhood streets. Some of them were backyard cams, others were "puppy cams" among various other nonsense.
But then, I clicked on one and it was a woman, just sitting in her house. I had no idea if she knew that her camera was insecurely connected to the web and being crawled by this search bot. As I was tinkering with this thing I noticed that her stereo was connected to her network. So I tried turning on her music to maybe give her a heads up that her shit was wide open to the world. I don't if it worked and I lost interest shortly there after. So I really have no idea if she ever locked her stuff down. Or disconnected it or whatever.
Anyway... I hope everyone is enjoying their evening and all.
Happy Monday/Tuesday! โฎ๏ธ
Why are these things online? Why are they not behind a firewall? But more importantly, why are people connecting these things to the internet? Seems like the height of stupidity to me.
A few years back, I stumbled across some sort of website that was a search engine for private/personal devices that were insecurely connected to the internet. So, naturally, I started browsing. It was mostly doorbell & security cameras. Most of them were pointed at the outside world. Busy neighborhood streets. Some of them were backyard cams, others were "puppy cams" among various other nonsense.
But then, I clicked on one and it was a woman, just sitting in her house. I had no idea if she knew that her camera was insecurely connected to the web and being crawled by this search bot. As I was tinkering with this thing I noticed that her stereo was connected to her network. So I tried turning on her music to maybe give her a heads up that her shit was wide open to the world. I don't if it worked and I lost interest shortly there after. So I really have no idea if she ever locked her stuff down. Or disconnected it or whatever.
Anyway... I hope everyone is enjoying their evening and all.
Happy Monday/Tuesday! โฎ๏ธ
๐ผ๐ ๐ โ๐ ๐ค๐๐ ๐ โ๐๐ก ๐ฆ๐๐ข๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ฆ... Yes. Perhaps. But she wasn't. I also called her media server a stereo, in my previous comment. I don't know if she even heard the music, (she didn't act like it) but I did seemingly have control over track selection and play/pause/stop, etc. For all I know the speakers were turned off or the volume was all the way down on a device I had no remote access to. But whatever. Maybe she liked the fact that her webcam was open for all the world to see?
This is one of the IoT search engines that I used to tinker with...
https://www.shodan.io/
It is, apparently, not as free and open as it used to be. Now it looks like it is by subscription, for the most part.
I did find this though...
http://www.insecam.org/en/bycountry/us/
There are also some other tricks you can do using google, or any other search engine, to search for insecure IoT devices, cameras, etc. For example...
intitle:"webcam" inurl:view/view.shtml
But these sorts of things also don't work as well as they used to.
Mr. Alarmist...
๐ผ ๐ค๐๐ข๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ป๐ ๐กโ๐๐ข๐โ๐ก ๐๐ก ๐ค๐๐ข๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ก๐ ๐๐๐๐ค๐ ๐คโ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐กโ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ค๐๐ ๐๐ ๐กโ๐ ๐๐๐๐ก๐ง...
I understand why a supermarket would be interested in having refrigerators/freezers that alert some people when they are malfunctioning. (How many fridges/freezers does a super market have? I'd imagine dozens. Maybe even 100.) But I see no reason to have the controls open to the web. I don't really even see much of a reason to have these devices alerting anyone who is not actually in the store. (Though I suppose you could have it send text messages to some people if it was really fritzing out after hours. Not that most workers should be on call like that.)
โฎ๏ธ