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I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

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Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#91

Post by cyanydeez »

ericmay wrote: post #70
CobaltFire wrote: post #67

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 overs…

Generally 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.…

With 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.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#92

Post by meliz242 »

Howdy y’all, author here. Just discovered this thread after wondering why Hacker News was a linked views source to my silly little freezergate braindump.

Wanted to offer a few clarifications:

I’m not a cybersecurity expert; I’m an investigator (in a totally different field), and this was essentially me following a weird thought to see where it went. My background is in natsec so that’s where my mind goes. There have since been at least dozens of additional freezer outages reported in a similar pattern, but I'm refraining from calling/tracking down every individual weirdness based on a Facebook comment at this point since there are much larger outlets with journalists more proficient than I covering this by now. Another interesting thing - There are numerous freezers and fridges within base stores, not under the control of DeCA/DoD, and none of those appear to be impacted.

I completely agree that a bad update/configuration or other shared technical failure may be the much more boring answer. The interesting part to me is that potentially hundreds of varying systems can converge upstream into common monitoring/control infrastructure. Anyone on this forum probably understands that, however IoT was something that was a relatively new concept when I was in school, and my degrees were somewhat relevant. The average person is blissfully unaware how expansive (and how much work behind safeguarding) the IoT is.

Also, since it came up: Yup. Human written. I’m pretty firmly anti-AI as a writer and also just, like, societally. I'll be sure to add some sort of footnote detailing my ai usage at the bottom of future public facing work, because I too detest reading (or questioning if what I'm reading is) slop. Minimal LLM used for understanding technical concepts and what the fuck fridge norms are…The weird formatting, excessive bolding, neurotic parentheticals, and rant energy are, unfortunately, totally my own. Sorry guys.

This was my first ever public post and intended audience was ~ 10 friends forced to read my diatribe, not thousands of strangers very validly raising questions I am not smart enough to answer myself. Appreciate the discussion and will be further educating myself on some of the points a few of you have brought up.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#93

Post by gavinsyancey »

TZubiri wrote: post #82
CobaltFire wrote: post #67

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 overs…

>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).

> Are these materially different?

A hack implies an adversary, and intentional targeting.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#94

Post by nwatson »

ericmay wrote: post #70
CobaltFire wrote: post #67

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 overs…

Generally 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.…

Did they airlift better supplies to a floating aircraft carrier somewhere in the northern Indian Ocean recently? No.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#95

Post by mnicky »

Hovertruck wrote: post #74
homeonthemtn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was getting hints of that as well.

Weirdly I felt like it got more LLM-y the further I got in. Then I hit the part with: But the thing I can’t get past is Fort Huachuca’s failure mode. Not: the freezer compressor died. Not: the power went out. Not even: the refrigeration system stopped cooling. Every freezer went into active defrost.

Well, definitely some LLM use :) At least in the second half... Confirmed with Pangram detector as well, which has pretty good precision.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#96

Post by jcurbo »

meliz242 wrote: post #92

Howdy y’all, author here. Just discovered this thread after wondering why Hacker News was a linked views source to my silly little freezergate braindump. Wanted to offer a few clarifications: I’m not a cybersecurity expert; I’m an investigator (in a totally different field), and this was essentially me following a weird thought to see where it went. My background is in natsec so that’s where my mind goes. There have…

Hi, I'm the poster. Sorry for the unexpected attention! I saw this on Bluesky and thought it was interesting enough to share here. If anything the style of your writing makes it stand out in a good way, we shouldn't always have polished/corporate-speak posts here.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#97

Post by edoceo »

lenerdenator wrote: post #85
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are usually on a separate Network. Then someone plugs in a cable because boss wants something "over there" and there's already a network that runs "over there". Or optimizes to a smart switch with vlans, and then someone else optimizes to a single vlan. It's not hard to not give a shit, or not understand, network security.

That someone can be brought into an office and shown a small diagram of the approved network topology. Then they can be shown a small diagram of the current network topology. Next, they can be asked if they're the same. If they're not, they can finally be asked if they're aware that deviating from the approved network topology without consulting infosec is grounds for termination of their employment.

Bunch of assumptions about operational excellence in there. Doesn't match my experience but, it does match my desire.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#98

Post by elictronic »

schiffern wrote: post #30
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the denominator? Every base has some kid of refrigerator, and there must be 100s-1000s of bases.

OTOH how many bases are effected and we didn't hear about it? Those 14 bases are only the ones we know about. Not just any failure, specifically heating the food (defrost) so it goes bad. Happening overnight, so it wouldn't be caught before it's too late. All that could still be a coincidence, but the more coincidences start to pile up the more we have to consider other possibilities too. I do agree it would be unusu…

The backbone of the US military is the logistics. It's why a US carrier being undersupplied was such a big deal. Making the US military look incompetent can very well be the goal.

Considering Iran is looking for any possible avenue to make the US look bad especially directly before an election with a president who cheerleads the military strongly while not actually putting the time or thought into what makes it strong.

This would be worth far more than the vulnerability itself to Iran right now. No real injuries causing escalation. Making a more capability adversary look foolish.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#99

Post by elictronic »

fg137 wrote: post #88

That's... a lot of words to say "freezers are down", with very little actual substance.

Freezer's went into defrost melting all the frozen food and ice. If they just go down you have days to weeks to respond before everything unfreezes just based on the thermal mass and size of the freezer.

This is a much bigger deal than the freezer being down.

Re: I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

#100

Post by avs733 »

scheme271 wrote: post #86
ericmay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally 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.…

More 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.

The 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-diet...). However, it is worth noting that food on a military installation =/= food nearby, for many obvious and non obsvious reasons.
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