The fridge was left open

There have been headlines about a fridge apocalypse in France this week. Supermarkets across the country had their refrigerators remotely set to defrost mode and tons of food got turned into a very expensive slurry.

These headlines have all been about a vicious cyber attack, even swarms of AI agents, and other scary digital masterminds.

Well, it seems those internet-connected Danfoss refrigerators ship with a default login set to… admin and with a rotating password set to… today’s date.

Once again, just another story of negligence, not hacking genius. The story of an industry that has figured out it can add a network card to anything (fridges, kettles, toothbrushes, …), call it “smart”, and pay no price whatsoever when someone walks through the door they left wide open (to be fair, the EU is working on laws around responsibility here).

The first question you should ask when adding any new equipment to your office is: does this really need to be connected to the internet? Because, as soon as it is, it’s a target (you can see the network scans almost immediately).

And, whatever the situation, please don’t leave logins or passwords set to the defaults, please don’t share passwords, don’t re-use them, and please please use a password manager.

Colin