European Cyber Attacks

[Butterscotchsauce]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq1kd1nee80eo

The news article doesn’t mention who or what is behind these attacks, I suppose that’s because we don’t know for sure?! But it just feels a bit like leaving a massive elephant in the room unmentioned.

I think I can guess who is responsible but can someone better educated than me say why no one is reporting who it is?

It has made me think about how our whole life is vulnerable to cyber attacks. Who even knew a freezer could be cyber attacked!

Apparently they are connected to the internet!

It's happened in America as well. Doesn't seem to get mentioned in the recent reports.

Pentagon freezer probe: Malfunctions at military bases were caused by hackers, US suspects | The Independent https://share.google/JhH55G6GtlfOb50RS

I too have no idea why fridges and freezers need to be connected to the Internet and thus vulnerable to a cyber attack.

This was my first question!

Surely by webbifying such basic functions is just an open door to attacks like this. We are making it too easy to be attacked.

I've always thought it was such a stupid idea to connect household appliances to the Internet, the stupidity is magnified 100 fold if large corporations connect their appliances to the Internet.

I have a little plug in electric fan heater that I keep on my kitchen table top. The kitchen always takes longer to heat than the rest is the house. It’s connected to an app so I can switch it on when I first wake up and take the chill off before I go down and make a cup of tea.

suffice to say I now keep it firmly unplugged and do not use it via the app.

At what point should we start being wary of Alexa

@olivietolivie I have never needed nor wanted Alexa, partly due to being a technophobe and partly because it is indeed listening to everything going on in your house! I know my phone probably is too, but at least that's only ever in one room, and kind of necessary for modern life, whereas we get by just fine without Alexa.

I have always been wary of Alexa, its paying for the loss of your privacy, why would anyone want that? I turn off those listening assistants on my phone as far as I can too (though I bet the phone still listens somehow)

Connecting freezers to the internet allows remote monitoring and remote diagnostics and repair, reducing maintenance costs. It allows routine tasks such as defrosting to be automated. It is understandable that companies want to take advantage of the savings they can make by connecting things to the internet. The problem comes when suppliers fail to take security sufficiently seriously and use outdated hardware or software, or fail to find and plug vulnerabilities in their own software.

The reason no-one is reporting who it is is that we don't know. My friends in the computer security industry say they aren't sure whether these are state sponsored attacks or a lone hacker. State sponsored attacks seem most likely, but which state? Russia? China? North Korea? There is no clear evidence pointing to any of them.

No, security researchers have conclusively proved that your phone does not listen to you. Even with the listening assistants turned on, all they are doing is passively listening for specific wake words like "OK Google", "Hey Siri" or whatever. They are not recording your private talks or spying for advertising.

Ya, my phone is now video calling me on Google Meet during my calls (I don't answer). I'm not joking. I looked up something about domestic violence on AI and now every time signs of abuse are picked up on my calls, I get a Google Meet call.

I know it's due to the domestic violence search because a notification popped up telling me. I'm not in a relationship..
That means our calls and AI are connected. I wasn't signed into any account when I was using AI either. I'm in Ireland

Well, aside from the obvious costs of a cyber attack, I would personally far rather they employ humans to monitor, diagnose and repair, like they always used to. Might help with unemployment!

Same with the ridiculous reduction in checkout staff, where youngsters can no longer get on the employment ladder (how many of us had our first job as a checkout operator, with weekend hours to fit around college and overtime if needed?)

This has little to do with your personal appliances at home. Retail chains have their equipment connected to a central server so they can see when & where there's a malfunction, automate defrosting and so on.

Hacking attempts have gone sky-high since AI got good at spotting vulnerabilities. Knocking out shop floor freezers looks like a 'just because' attack by an individual, who was probably not targeting anyone in particular. They may simply have set their AI off to look for a certain class of vulnerability.

In the greater scheme of things, though, national and international infrastructures are under constant attack by political aggressors, criminal organisations and low-level smartarses. It's a worry.

You may prefer that they employ humans, but a supplier that does so will face increased costs (up to 30% additional maintenance costs). They would have to pass these costs on to supermarkets who, in turn, would have to pass the costs on to us.

Where two suppliers are equal in terms of the equipment they supply but one offers substantially lower costs, supermarkets are always going to go with the cheaper supplier. So, from the perspective of suppliers like Danfoss, the choice is between connecting their appliances to the internet or losing market share, potentially to the point where they go out of business.

This really is another level of corporate stupidity, isn't it?

Anyway, why the heck would a defrosting process need to be operated remotely instead of by people in the actual individual store itself?

It can be completely automated to make sure it happens reliably at the right time. But that is not the main motivation for connecting them to the internet. That is about monitoring them centrally, and being able to diagnose and fix problems without having to send an engineer out to the store every time. Automation of defrosting cycles is just a useful extra.

You should have been wary about Alexa from the beginning.. it was made solely to listen to you in your house so it can learn about your behaviours and things you buy so they can sell your data and make more money from you. Apart from the obvious blatent spying that they are no doubt doing.

This is a myth. It has been fully checked by security researchers and, just as with the assistants on smartphones, Alexa is only listening for the wake word "Alexa". Audio is not recorded, saved or sent to Amazon until it hears the wake word (or something sufficiently similar to trigger it).

Malware can take control of your microphone and listen though. And though ok Google and suchlike are only passively listening for the activation command they are known to misinterpret background noise as commands and have recorded conversations then.

Absolutely fed up of hearing this argument about self service checkouts. Since they have been implemented other departments have been created or made bigger so there’s just different types of roles now. Home delivery is the biggest department in my store, they didn’t exist a few years ago so there’s new jobs there. Exactly the same with clothing and home & leisure, think back a few years and these departments were not as large as they are now so more jobs have been created here as well.

As for the fridges, having them monitored remotely triggers an alarm if the temperature rises and if they can’t fix it then we get called out to store in the middle of the night to empty them if there’s no night shift running. It cuts down on food waste massively which is a good thing for businesses and customers.

Indeed, but turning off assistants doesn't do anything to stop malware. And I would always recommend checking the privacy settings for any assistant that records conversations in the cloud and set it to auto-delete recordings.

Definitely by now!

Because they are remotely managed, updated, monitored for faults etc by an external company. In the good old days this would have been done over a dedicated ISDN line that would have been invulnerable to hackers unless you actually broke into the exchange. Now of course it’s far cheaper to route everything over the public internet.

But even systems that are not connected to the public internet are vulnerable - you can use social engineering to get people to innocently install an “update” (actually a Trojan horse) that then wrecks the system. This is how the Israelis destroyed that first Iranian nuclear programme - by convincing them to install software updates that messed with the controllers on the enrichment centrifuges causing them to get out of balance and tear themselves apart.

And that's why I always think there's a possibility my phone is listening to me, because you can't stop malware beyond usual security measures. But stopping assistants from accessing your microphone at least stops one potential issue.