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Supermarket fridge at night (AI-generated)

If you need another convincing argument against exposing a device’s built-in web interface to the open internet, look no further than the recent attacks on supermarket fridges in France.

Attackers apparently found the web servers built into refrigeration controllers on the internet, then took control of them and forced the fridges and freezers into defrost mode overnight. It’s not yet confirmed exactly how they got in, but authentication bypass vulnerabilities in some of the affected controllers had been publicly disclosed. Hundreds of stores were hit, with losses estimated in the millions of euros.

None of this should come as a surprise. We have known for well over a decade that the web applications built into IoT and embedded devices are far from secure. Buggy authentication, vulnerable web servers, frameworks and network stacks, default passwords that are never changed, security updates that are never installed: there are many reasons why these devices are such easy targets. A patch for one of the exploited flaws had been available for about a year, yet thousands of controllers were still reachable online.

That’s why there should always be at least one additional layer of security between the open internet and any device.

A solution like macchina.io REMOTE could have easily prevented this debacle, without any changes to the firmware on the fridge controllers. Replace the old internet router with one that can run the macchina.io REMOTE Gateway software, and deploy the macchina.io REMOTE server on a cloud provider of your choice (our hosting partner is happy to help). Service technicians keep their remote access, while the controllers disappear from the open internet. Problem solved.

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