A couple years ago I worked on a service that had to communicate with a Siemens S7-1500 PLC. Based on my experience with that project, none of what I’ve read recently about unsecured industrial PLCs is surprising.
I opened Siemens TIA Portal and PLCSIM for the first time and thought “wow, I didn’t think the Windows 95 GUI library was still supported.” None of the PLC contractors we had hired knew how to enable TLS on the thing (user/pass eg admin/admin was their usual). Anecdote: I once spent hours reading the docs and clicking around trying to get it to accept an SSL certificate signed by a real CA and it wouldn’t go, but it accepted one I self-signed in openssl.
In all fairness, the people who are experts in the field of Siemens PLC programming are usually mechanical-ish engineers and security is not in their skill set or on their mind.
Isn't this the industry expectation in that kind of equipment? If it was signed by a real CA the cert. could expire and render the equipment unable to communicate.
The author doesn't really claim it was a hack, just that it is a possibility. But they are charging down the path of the potential hack before asking the more obvious question: How many refrigerators exist in the military at all? And of those, how many are having problems?
Because a half dozen a day sounds plausible as standard maintenance issues, as the author acknowledges. If it were a hack, I'd expect something like 50% of them to have problems. But not knowing how many there are, I don't know how significant these incidents really are.
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 unusual to 'waste' a vuln like that, but perhaps the implant/CVE was about to be exposed anyway.
> I learned that commissaries (of which there are ~235 worldwide) aren’t actually independently operated by whatever military installation or base they happen to sit on.
according to the article, the denominator is ~235.
Then I would suspect that this is either down to the common control system, or there has been a batch failure of the controllers in the freezers that were presumably ordered and supplied at the same time.
I've seen batch failures in radio equipment where I could predict 100% accurately which devices would fail based on the range of serial numbers.
There are a couple hundred US armed forces bases each with commissaries that would be managed by DeCA.
An attack like the author hypothesized would require a LOTL modus operandi, and doing so on 14 locations wouldn't justify completely blowing up an entire LOTL operation, because it exposes indicators, registers, and tradecraft that is then shared amongst all security vendors.
The way it's framed is clickbait at its worst with the added issue of limited security experience, but the same can be said of HN in general.
This would be a bigger deal for the commissary locations outside the US, though I see none are on the list. Many of the very junior enlisted make very little money (~2400USD/month), and the low pricing at the commissary helps quite a lot. In the US, you would typically have some affordable off-base options. Overseas, it depends. Many of the locations are remote, or in places where the local groceries are significantly more expensive.
I'm in the firmware bug camp too. Over/under on "the remote management server went down and a bug on all the freezers decided to put them back into some form of local control where its first action was to do a defrost cycle then put it back into offline service"?
And at some point in hindsight it will be obvious what fractions of problems were
A. This technology is inherently crap, that's our fault
B. A bored teenager broke it. Bored teenagers are a thing, it literally doesn't matter which country they are in, stop building things bored teenagers will blow up, this is also inherently our fault
C. Foreign Adversaries
It suits both mass media audience figures and a narrative of wily enemies rather than incompetence to pin everything on C and it seems eminently possible that a country with as many enemies as the US would attract this sometimes, but the reality is that both A and B are much more likely despite being embarrassing.
There's a far simpler explanation than some outside actor (either state sponsored or otherwise) deciding that the best thing they can do is to muck around with freezers.
We know there's been a severe rot of operational capabilities in the military thanks for Hegseths purges and general stupidity. It's entirely possible and quite likely that over the course of his various drunken binges he decided to get rid of people who were in charge of operational control for stuff like freezers across military bases.
I would agree, but the freezers going into high heat defrost mode seems like an intentional action from someone, whether that be incompetence or malice on the side of DeCA, or malice from a third party. If they got rid of the people commanding the freezers what to do, I feel like they'd just stay on whatever mode they were already on, rather than suddenly command all the freezers to defrost
That's the exact sort of thing the military would want us to think, because 'we were hacked by another nation' sounds a lot better than 'we fired the people responsible for food logistics'. You're not going to be able to divine the real reason this way.
I opened Siemens TIA Portal and PLCSIM for the first time and thought “wow, I didn’t think the Windows 95 GUI library was still supported.” None of the PLC contractors we had hired knew how to enable TLS on the thing (user/pass eg admin/admin was their usual). Anecdote: I once spent hours reading the docs and clicking around trying to get it to accept an SSL certificate signed by a real CA and it wouldn’t go, but it accepted one I self-signed in openssl.
In all fairness, the people who are experts in the field of Siemens PLC programming are usually mechanical-ish engineers and security is not in their skill set or on their mind.
Because a half dozen a day sounds plausible as standard maintenance issues, as the author acknowledges. If it were a hack, I'd expect something like 50% of them to have problems. But not knowing how many there are, I don't know how significant these incidents really are.
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 unusual to 'waste' a vuln like that, but perhaps the implant/CVE was about to be exposed anyway.
Interesting times...
according to the article, the denominator is ~235.
I've seen batch failures in radio equipment where I could predict 100% accurately which devices would fail based on the range of serial numbers.
An attack like the author hypothesized would require a LOTL modus operandi, and doing so on 14 locations wouldn't justify completely blowing up an entire LOTL operation, because it exposes indicators, registers, and tradecraft that is then shared amongst all security vendors.
The way it's framed is clickbait at its worst with the added issue of limited security experience, but the same can be said of HN in general.
Could be a hack or a design flaw. I await the root cause analysis.
Not exactly strong evidence presented here, but it wouldn't be a surprise either
A. This technology is inherently crap, that's our fault
B. A bored teenager broke it. Bored teenagers are a thing, it literally doesn't matter which country they are in, stop building things bored teenagers will blow up, this is also inherently our fault
C. Foreign Adversaries
It suits both mass media audience figures and a narrative of wily enemies rather than incompetence to pin everything on C and it seems eminently possible that a country with as many enemies as the US would attract this sometimes, but the reality is that both A and B are much more likely despite being embarrassing.
We know there's been a severe rot of operational capabilities in the military thanks for Hegseths purges and general stupidity. It's entirely possible and quite likely that over the course of his various drunken binges he decided to get rid of people who were in charge of operational control for stuff like freezers across military bases.
“If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them.” —Sun Tzu, The Art of War