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As someone who spent over 20 years active duty, and spent a ton of my career in the IT, security, etc. side of the house: Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to
by CobaltFire 1mo ago
As someone who spent over 20 years active duty, and spent a ton of my career in the IT, security, etc. side of the house:
Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to be a misconfiguration or update sent incorrectly.
That said, the timing of the disclosure and the issue are rather concerning.
Regarding the highest value targets to hit with an attack like this, you would want to target Guam, Hawai'i, and other isolated overseas locations where this would have ripple effects in the local economy. Guam specifically would cause catastrophic supply shortages, since DeCA probably supplies around 50% of the groceries on that island (that's a WAG based on my time there).
- ericmay 1mo agoGenerally agree with your assessment, but in the case of Guam or other more remote installations if there were catastrophic issues we'd just airlift food in. Costly but certainly manageable. Hawaii I'm not sure why that would be an issue unless the whole island was attacked or shut down. Even if the on-base shops were hacked you could just go shop at Wal-Mart or Costco or any number of other locations on the islands. If there was an extended issue then the commander could authorize meal stipends as they do for some units today and then you would just go buy food off-base. Ideal? No. Manageable? Very much.
- scheme271 1mo agoMore to the point for Guam and similar locations, canned and non-perishable food can are probably around and more can be airlifted in to get people through it. It was pretty much the standard back in the day.
- avs733 1mo agoThe diet in Guam is already heavily dependent on shelf stable foods. I know this from personal experience but theres a surprising (to me) amount of research on it as well (c.v., https://www.guampedia.com/health-consequences-of-modern-diets-on-guam/ https://www.guampedia.com/health-consequences-of-modern-diet...). However, it is worth noting that food on a military installation =/= food nearby, for many obvious and non obsvious reasons.
- cyanydeez 1mo agoWith the current admin, assumptions about capabilities are just wrong. One of the reasons for consitency above all else is to use the power of history. Ahistorical is now the defacto standard. All asdumptions about America power are toilet paper.
- ericmay 1mo agoFor this to be true it would also mean that assumptions about capabilities in a negative light are also wrong. If one were to say the US is extremely weak, that would be an assumption about a capability that is now by your decree also just wrong. In other words, this comment is rather meaningless when read plainly - I mean that factually, not as an insult.
- cyanydeez 1mo agosure. stop generating.
- nwatson 1mo agoDid they airlift better supplies to a floating aircraft carrier somewhere in the northern Indian Ocean recently? No.
- ericmay 1mo ago[flagged]
- nkrisc 1mo agoSurely airlifting supplies to a carrier in a war zone is not totally comparable to airlifting supplies to a base in a US territory?
- ceejayoz 1mo agoThere was supposed to be a base there. The Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain got flattened.
- wongarsu 1mo agoThat explains why resupply doesn't work as well as in peace time But at the same time, it's not like that came out of nowhere. If you attack a country, that country shooting back at any military installations in missile range has to be one of the expected outcomes. Given the US had all the initiative in starting the conflict I would have hoped there was a logistics plan that involved not relying on those bases to continue to exist
- mulmen 1mo ago> Given the US had all the initiative in starting the conflict I would have hoped there was a logistics plan that involved not relying on those bases to continue to exist. Anyone with the capability to plan for the Iran war never would have started it because the costs would have been obvious. In other words the only way to start a war with Iran is to have no plan for it.
- 1mo ago
- CobaltFire 1mo agoI didn't mean to imply that this would hit Hawai'i as hard as Guam, just that it would be one of the more effective places to hit with a DeCA supply chain attack.
- 0xWTF 1mo agoGuam freezers and chillers were offline several times the years when I was there. You just didn't get milk, butter, eggs, ice cream, meat, etc those weeks.
- CobaltFire 1mo agoCan't recall them going offline island wide when I was there (given there are two on not quite opposite sides of the island). I do recall one having downtime when the other was up and having to deal with that.
- jamiek88 1mo agoWhen were you there?
- sjducb 1mo agoManageable during peacetime. In a war with another major power resources would be stretched thin and depriving bases of food would reduce combat effectiveness.
- ericmay 1mo agoSure but that won't happen in Guam or Hawaii. Guam would be evacuated first. Also these same things apply to any other major power (perhaps more so) who would also see their resources stretched then and their bases deprived of food to reduce combat effectiveness.
- TZubiri 1mo ago>Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to be a misconfiguration or update sent incorrectly. Are these materially different? Assuming that there wasn't a literal command to turn off all freezers, from an organizational, non criminal perspective, to the organization the damage will be the same, the root cause will be a bug (whether exploited by chance or malice), and the fix will be the same(fixing the bug).
- gavinsyancey 1mo ago> Are these materially different? A hack implies an adversary, and intentional targeting.
- TZubiri 1mo agoBut is it materially different? Or is it a difference in quantitative increase of likelihood of the exploit? The thesis "everything hackable" will be hacked, and with the advent of hacking LLMs, the boundary between criminal hacking and civil hacking is being blurred, it's no longer attributable to a criminal intent, hacking commands are just something that happens through no criminal intent. Practically, the hackers, whether human or syntehtic, are a catalyst, they accelerate the rate at which a bug that causes damage will manifest, and perhaps the magnitude of the manifestation, but the essence of the negative manifestation of that bug is the same. Whether it was triggered by a solar ray flipbit or by a rogue LLM or by a russian hacker, the essence of the issue is the same.
- namenotrequired 1mo agoYes? “one of us made a mistake” vs “someone is attacking us” is a difference that people care about.
- croon 1mo agoNot only care about; a mistake is unlikely to be repeated, a motivated attack is very likely to be attempted again.
- aaron695 1mo ago[dead]
- segmondy 1mo ago[flagged]
- munificent 1mo agoWe are a very social species who likely evolved to feel good when we share juicy information.
- CobaltFire 1mo agoNothing I shared is, in any way, even close to something I am concerned with sharing. This type of wargaming scenario is literally stuff they give to brand new kids out of high school to get them thinking. It's not anything close to "loose lips sink ships."
- metaphor 1mo ago[dead]
- xaxbxcxdxe 1mo ago[dead]
- addag 1mo agoIn any cases, it is a strong evidence that the freezer can be remotely controlled globally, and this is in itself a source of concerns (what other electrical equipment can be controlled remotely, especially on such critical features?)
- small_scombrus 1mo ago> it is a strong evidence that the freezer can be remotely controlled globally As per the article that's literally a selling feature
- wjnc 1mo agoThis points to either an inside job (a US gov agency that feels it needs to create urgency) or Iran (that has an urgent need to do something), since no serious adversary would use this capability in the absence of a theater.
- wood_spirit 1mo agoOr criminals (perhaps ransom not paid etc) or Kiddies for the lolz or US teen lashing out or any of the gazillion nationalist-aligned hackers who don’t like USA. But a misconfiguration is even more likely. Can’t think _why_ freezers need to be web connected and remotely managed in the first place. What benefits does that bring the commissary in normal operation?
- pests 1mo agoTo try to guess at a plausible answer, any monitoring / remote management stemmed from wanting to keep an eye on temps over time. Freezers can go out of temp for only so long before its all bad. Tada. It saves someone from making the rounds with a clipboard and writing down temps every X hours. I agree its unneeded, just I can see the thought process.
- NetMageSCW 1mo agoRemote monitoring doesn’t imply remote management- one is sensible, one is a power trip. We are required to monitor our refrigeration and we did it with a distributed system of wireless sensor that upload to a cloud service. It’s independent and there’s no risk of loss from it.
- jarym 1mo agoNo expert but mechanical parts all built to the same specification and used in more or less the same manner can fail around the same time. We see that in commercial aviation a lot which is why when there’s so much as 2 instances of a similar failure within a short timespan investigators start looking more closely at maintenance and manufacturing.
- nottorp 1mo agoWould a hostile state actor with access to basically a command and control network inside military bases ruin the food or stay quiet and try to use it to gain access to more interesting systems?
- aa-jv 1mo ago>Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to be a misconfiguration or update sent incorrectly. These two states are indistinguishable from each other. A good hack looks like a poorly configured maintenance update, and vice versa.
- pcthrowaway 1mo agoI'm also reminded of the HPE SSD time-bomb bug which would cause catastrophic failure after exactly 32,768 hours of use[1]. Could there be a common denominator in when these refrigerators went online? [1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hp-warns-that-some-ssd-drives-will-fail-at-32-768-hours-of-use/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hp-warns-that...
- cjrp 1mo ago787s too https://www.theregister.com/software/2020/04/02/boeing-787s-must-be-turned-off-and-on-every-51-days-to-prevent-misleading-data-being-shown-to-pilots/485727 https://www.theregister.com/software/2020/04/02/boeing-787s-...
- tyrabound 1mo agoThat is also likely true, i.e., misconfiguration, but this is not a "military freezers hacked" story, it is a story of many different controllers of many different refrigeration company products being "hacked" through the humongous barn doors they all have wide open. It's really just bad journalism.
- roosterIllusi0n 1mo agoThat makes no sense. If you are russian, iranian, or chinese; you have an incentive for damage and chaos. If they had the chance to push any number of freezers into defrost, there is no reason not to do it. Pretending that hacks and damage are all preplanned in advance with a room of military scientist programmers as a way to dismiss the notion is silly. These will be attacks based on in-the-moment opportunity, not specifc preplanning for each attack.