I would be very skeptical of anyone relying on Shodan data. At one point I was trying to write honeypots myself by replicating wifi cameras, but almost all the ones on the internet I found were honeypots of some sort, and the ones that weren't were already hacked and had their web pages replaced. In retrospect it would have probably been better to get a vulnerable device myself and probe it.<p>If I were you, I would probably ensure that the fridges you used have residential or commercial (aka non-DC) IP addresses. Maybe Shodan uses this data for their "honeypot" label, my experience was some time ago so no idea though.
An extra insight, there was some news of 'blood banks' also being targetted. This is possibly a stronger (painful) target. It would demorelize people that are donors.
<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/security/blood-hack-fridge-cyber-attack-b3079644.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/security/blood-hack-fridg...</a>
Why would it, scarcity generally motivates
Plot twist: the hackers are members of the Van Helsing Society and the supermarkets were just a trial run in their war against the International Vampire Cabal.
One thing keeps coming back, (and it's the story of industries where security and patching is an afterthought).<p>a supermarket has no security team.
If a fridge controller needs patching, a VPN and a strong password to be safe, that work has to come from the vendor or installer by default.
One would hope that all these come by default or as a feature on these devices. It could even be a selling feature and not part of an expensive maintenance contract. A supermarket manager cannot be expected to do this work.
That seems pretty location dependant. In Australia at least the two major supermarket chains are not insignificant (e.g. EBITDA ~$5 billion and ~$2.6 billion) and have large internal tech and cyber teams.<p>I think this is more indicative of the plethora of technical debt and straight up technical negligence that's accompanied the past 10-15 years of internet connected everything. What's happening today is the predictable result of project based works funded by capex deploying assets (of all types) with no consideration of opex funding for the technology components.<p>Just because a webserver is running in some physical device (fridge, camera, vacuum, washing machine, pump controller, lighting system, audiovisual equipment, access control system etc) does not magically exempt it from the same sort of ongoing sysadmin and maintenance you'd expect as a baseline for something running on standard compute. That applies equally to manufacturers publishing firmware, and the asset owners/service companies that have the responsibility to apply.
This is how it should work: supermarket wants to use high tech stuff such as connected fridges, they get a cyber insurance policy as part of all the other insurances they have. The insurer then has domain experts to figure out what the insured needs to do to meet a risk threshold (or they adjust fees accordingly).<p>This model has worked fine for many other types of risks.
Wait, I recall reading the threads about someone speculating there was a hack. Some people suggested it could just be that a large percentage of refrigeration units received a software update at the same time which resembled a hack.<p>Is there a definitive story that someone actually did hack these units on a grand scale?
There have been (at least) two separate waves to this now, which makes the "innocent broken update" speculation much less likely?
This type of attack lasted few days in different countries, quite hard to believe the fridge manufacturer could keep pushing these updates after all the news around.
That's a known playbook. Stir up shit, then create an uplausible denial which will take experts some time to debunk. Once it's figured out the story was bs, put out another three. By the week end there is 10 narratives and nobody except the field experts is sure that it's the usual suspects doing the usual things, but nobody listens to those
Fwiw, the first thread I recall was a speculative blog post about commissary freezers for the US military: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506</a>
That's the first of four incidents I've seen in the news recently. As far as I know it's the one that could have been some other kind of correlated failure (bad update, calendar bug, whatever). We don't know much about it.<p>After that were two separate supermarket events, which I think were both linked to the known Danfoss vulnerability (CVE-2025-41450); and most recently a blood bank event.
Now, as of November 2026, it is confirmed as a hack.<p>Confirmed exploits, many manufacturers, experts, …
> Is there a definitive story that someone actually did hack these units on a grand scale?<p>Given the scope here (see map at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_French_supermarket_refrigerator_hack" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_French_supermarket_refrig...</a>), it'd either be individual hackers getting inspired from their neighbor hackers, or one actor targeting European countries.<p>Although seemingly the hack wasn't so sophisticated, maybe it's truly just some kids fucking around with what they see being open, and maybe just want to target European countries for the "lulz" or whatever, who knows.
The interesting aspect of these attacks was that they seemed to have been done per country.
Not a headline I ever expected to read. 2026 has been a wild year.
You'd probably have more luck posing as other industrial hardware like HVAC, lighting, controllers for the kinds of pumps or valves you'd find in chemical plants. That kind of stuff.
New ideas are popping up. I started with fridges because of the recent attacks, but the code makes it easy to add personas. Electric car charing stations and coffee machines were my initial idea, but HVAC and building controllers are probably better ideas. Thanks!
Super cool, especially showing your work as FOSS, but: why announce your honeypot before it’s fulfilled its intended purpose once?
Did you write this post with AI?<p>- Letting them in. Default logins open a fake store dashboard with defrost buttons, so you see the second move, not just the first. Nothing behind it is real.<p>Given the context, this reads like vomit.
Very cool. Seems like this is the modern hacker version of "is your refrigerator running?"
Me reading it be like:<p>MFs be doing everything but pulling those fridges off the Internet. Given the amount of TOR nodes, IP addresses today, Honeypots mean nothing ....<p>Of course, it's my unpopular opinion. :)
The hilarious thing about this is that there was an initial hack, and then like a month later another one that was equally successful. Who could have possibly seen that coming lol.<p>> Default logins open a fake store dashboard with defrost buttons, so you see the second move, not just the first.<p>I think we're past the point where it's reasonable to expect people to not use AI for code, but their prose still sucks balls. You should at least write your submission here yourself, come on.
I agree, I rushed this one a bit. Glad to share with the industry at least.
Crazy thing is, when the fridges in all those military bases were hacked people were initially in denial and the people noticing that it was just a little too coincidental to be happing simultaneously were called paranoid. Well who's paranoid now?
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