I think Russia is doing random stuff of the kind, my understanding is it’s just about sawing general chaos, not doing a strong action that would be discussed at a diplomatic level.
Russia's idea of hybrid warfare means doing things like dragging anchors across internet cables and paying people to firebomb warehouses and businesses.
There are - in addition to that - examples of Russian financing and influence operations alongside this. Take for example France’s Front National that received a €9.4 million loan from the First Czech Russian Bank in 2014. Separately, the US DOJ’s 2024 Doppelganger case alleged a Kremlin-directed operation using fake news sites and social-media accounts to influence elections and weaken support for Ukraine.
Those are different mechanisms, but they illustrate why the damage from an influence campaign cannot be measured solely in immediate economic losses. My concern is the feedback loop: disruption creates grievances, propaganda amplifies them, and political actors can turn those grievances into support.
That does not establish who was behind this particular refrigerator attack. Attribution still needs evidence. But “the direct damage was small” is not enough to conclude that an operation has no strategic value.
So agree with you. Just more shit flooding the zone.
Btw. there is also a separate interesting stream if one asks the question about wealthy technology investors’ attitudes toward democratic constraints.
Like Peter Thiel explicitly wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
My concern is that concentrated private power and foreign interference can both weaken democratic accountability, even when their motives differ. The results are a win for both by weakening democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Night
I mean, how dare Estonia not be ecstatic about the Soviet soldiers who kept them thoroughly liberated until 1991.
Recall Trump's regime refused at one point to sell weapons to Ukraine.
Continually undermining the leader of a country who's defence prevents Putin's expansion and further war in Europe ... it's not 'discord' it's absolute treachery.
Okay, let me explain why this is wrong. This will be an imperfect example, but hopefully it gets the point across.
When you shut down the refrigerators and freezers of something like 700 stores, people notice. They go to get food that day, and there is nothing fresh. Nothing. Go to the next store, still no fresh or frozen food.
Was there a natural disaster? No. Was there an attack? Yes, but the attacker is unknown. But who was in charge? Who was supposed to prevent this? They remember.
It's getting colder outside in the North, fall is here. This is traditionally a time where a lot of people were, for thousands and thousands of years, stocking up food and doing final harvests to survive the long winter.
If suddenly hundreds of stores don't have fresh food across the country, that is a large impact. Not even just what happened, but what could happen. If it happened to these hundreds of stores, what about thousands? What about other types of stores? What about other types of attacks? And your brain starts thinking about the other possible type of things that might be able to be fucked with remotely. The fear sets in. People that are afraid make less rational decisions. Maybe they also decide the current people in political power aren't fit for task, because they can't keep them safe. Maybe this didn't happen under the other guys.
Meanwhile, millions of dollars of food was just wasted. Not only that, but it also has to be disposed of. Because it's such a large amount of food, it will take additional trips from the trash disposal service. They may even bring people in on overtime across the country. The people at the stores themselves will probably work extra hours, quickly trying to rotate the bad food out and hopefully (now if not soon) get the new food in. In addition, the food logistics network has to get additional shipments of food it wasn't expecting to transport to hundreds of stores. That's a lot of extra time on the road, a lot of extra wear on equipment. It also stresses the food supply and production itself.
So I don't know what "doesn't have any real impact" looks like to you, but to summarize, this is going to do millions of dollars of economic and political damage, and contributes to social upheaval. It probably cost next to nothing to actually attack.
(This is also right out of Russia's hybrid war playbook against Europe. Russia just sank a Bulgarian tanker btw: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmn06w5x9g25o )
millions of dollars of economic damage sure, it doesn't contribute to social upheaval. It's a one time pain in the ass, this seems pretty hysterical tbh
They are constantly running tons of attacks like this. This one you heard about because it hit grocery store systems, but the attacks big and small all over Europe right now are staggering. Physical and digital. Arson attacks on warehouses, drone attacks, gun dead drops in the German woods, etc etc etc.
Eventually people don't feel safe anymore. That's the goal.
You're looking at moving a single chess pawn like it's the entire game. No, it's just one move.
> It's a one time pain in the ass, this seems pretty hysterical tbh
You're not thinking about the second and third order effects enough, either.
How much labor is going to go into trying to patch these systems or redesign the physical or digital infra for them? For each store? How many other systems like this are online and just didn't get hit? Those will need to be patched and upgrades too, maybe taken offline. So if they normally monitor these remotely, now they have to add another system in place for vpn, increasing cost and time and complexity. Now EVERY vendor of similar systems is going to be looking at how to not end up on the news like this.
Now expand beyond fridgerators. Think about freezers, too. Water systems. Power distribution. Internet access. Payment systems. Government websites, etc. All of this stuff is under attack right now.
Remember lots of Russian tactics is pretending they can do a lot of bad stuff if people don’t do what they want. “Stop helping Ukraine or we will nuke you”.
Also USA has been pinning every single cyber attack on Russia/Iran/NK/China for several years, and I am personally very doubtful that western countries do not run ransomwares. In any case the result is that everyone thinks those countries do have the capability to do this.
Possibly, but I bet most of their nuclear stockpile hasn't been kept maintained and it wouldn't surprise me if parts of it had been stolen to be sold. This is why Putin threatens a nuclear attack, but doesn't do it as there's a good chance it would show how many duds they have (also setting off nukes would likely force a response from other countries).
Which their leadership never fails to mention when we (the EU) goes past some imaginary red line.
There are no red lines. There is only drone war and making Russia regret that they are attacking our allies.
France has presidential elections coming up next year, and growing civil unrest is happening. Cyber attacks are routine, and several have been officially attributed to Russia.
Anything that can trigger fear can elicit irrational reactions. That has been a known propaganda tool since forever.
> Every society is three meals away from revolution.
So I wouldn't entirely handwave it away.
In this case the question is, if US Army freezers were hacked earlier, why did nobody brief other operators of cooling equipment. Its a failure at the top! Everyone is getting flustered and knives are out.
But maybe they could not fix the underlying software or whatever and were not ready to share details without opening themselves up to more attacks. Also there are a lot of attacks happening all the time, which ones do you share?
If the psychological pressure at the top increases, more mistakes will be made. Sometimes mistakes can be subtle over or under reactions, sometimes the mistake is not to do anything. It is real effort to evaluate an appropriate response. For example, the military could reach out to commercial operators quicker, but then they have to handle all the comms, questions, and they also potentially leak more attack vectors. The commercials also start having this overhead of having to read emails from the military and internally those orgs have to deal with that overhead in comms to evaluate the seriousness.
This is a problem, because very few orgs have spare capacity for this stuff and so they have a choice. They can react to the military comms and risk mistakes somewhere else due to comms / management bottlenecks, or vice versa. There are only bad choices. And every time this happens, another choice has to be made.
Lots of these will be low-level attacks with manageable impact, which lowers the alertness over time, until that moment when something serious happens. If at point everyone is exhausted a real costly mistake will happen. Its the long game.
In this case, I am sure a consideration was that the attack was already used against high-profile cases and it makes sense to just use the attack vector more broadly before it gets closed.
Wait, it has its own cellular modem? Nevermind, then.
I agree that they had a firmware update, but unless they had the operational capacity to update the checks notes freezers of all their customers, that is not a fix. The theoretical and technological aspects of solving a problem are often the easy parts.
It's like if NASA would claim to have a fix for the Opportunity rover on mars to get it operational again. All they need to do is to replace the batteries. Well, that is not a fix if there is no way to actually replace the batteries in practice.
I don't see why the existence of a firmware update would remove the culpability of negligence from the hardware manufacturer.
“Also there are a lot of attacks happening all the time, which ones do you share?”
Completely untrue.
People going to the store to get food that day remember.
In Poland there were arson attacks on malls - https://warszawa.tvp.pl/95886809/pozar-marywilskiej-44-ruszy...
They also attempted to derail passenger trains - https://www.rp.pl/kraj/art43362151-rzecz-w-tym-sabotaz-na-to...
They used drones to block airports across Europe (I ended with overnight stay after they attacked Eindhoven) - this one has no direct proof, but it was obviously Russia.
Russia used list of hospitals in Syria. As bombing target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93Syrian_hospita... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/world/middleeast/russia-b...
When Armenia complained about poor performance of Russian weapons video of one of attacks was released as proof that weapons are fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
"Russia has never hatched, is not hatching and will never hatch any plans to attack anyone," he stressed. "Russia is a peaceful country, which is interested in good relations with its neighbors." -- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
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that is just recent, if you look for older then say Beria is case where accurate depiction would be criticized as not realistic and ridiculous
It's been cartoonish for over a decade. An elderly spoiled rich kid is running the USA into the ground along with his playmates starting wars he said he wouldn't. Another elderly infantile man is upset one of his vassal states had a tantrum and invaded it. Some other children got really angry after a terrorist attack and retaliated with 100x casualties in a "nah nah nah we got more bombs than you." A shrewd child is turning his industrial power house into a large technopanopticon while selling it to other nations along with debt traps all while eyeing a former sovereign territory for takeover.
At this point I would rather vote for actual cartoon characters like Daffy Duck or Goofy. Duck Season FIRE!
Last night, after Trump told everyone he made an energy peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, Russia attacked Ukraine energy infrastructure and left 600,000 people without power. These attacks on energy will be even more deadly as winter sets in.
Is that cartoonishly evil?
That's exactly what's happening.
https://brusselsmorning.com/von-der-leyen-proposes-european-...