Mark Gordon

20-year tradesman turned agency founder. FieldTech helps fellow owners automate, market, and streamline their business.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

Most people still think the freezers were just turned off.
They weren’t.

Someone forced the cases into continuous defrost and silenced the temperature alarms. Normal defrost is 10–15 minutes. Left on, the cases climb to 50°C fast while the system can still look okay from the outside.

That’s why stores didn’t get the usual early warning. The same access that controls the equipment also controls the alarms.

This isn’t complicated. A lot of food infrastructure is still running on older remote-access setups that were never designed for this. When it fails, the cost doesn’t stay with the chain, it’s passed on to the consumer!

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

I’ve worked in commercial refrigeration for 20 years and have been seeing a lot of comments asking why freezers and coolers are connected to the internet, and how they could get this warm. A bit of context:

Commercial refrigeration has used DDC (Direct Digital Control) and BAS (Building Automation System) platforms for decades. These systems continuously monitor temperatures, pressures, and equipment status. If a freezer fails at 11 p.m., they automatically alarm and dispatch a technician before product is lost. Across grocery stores and cold storage facilities, this prevents billions of dollars in food loss every year. They also let technicians remotely diagnose and fix issues before they become failures.

What appears to have happened here is that the attackers forced the cases into a prolonged defrost cycle instead of simply turning them off. In freezers, defrost normally uses electric heaters or hot-gas defrost for 10 to 15 minutes every few hours (or as needed by sensors) to clear ice off the evaporator. In coolers it’s usually just stopping the refrigerant flow while the fans run. These cycles are short and controlled so the product stays in a safe temperature range. If someone overrides that and leaves the heaters or hot gas running, temperatures climb quickly, which matches the 50 °C reports.

It’s fair to ask whether these systems should be online. In practice, modern grocery and industrial plants are too complex to operate without remote monitoring and control. Removing that connectivity would raise food costs and increase spoilage. These platforms are normally locked down with multiple layers of security; seeing them successfully attacked at this scale is genuinely concerning.

Hope that helps explain how something like this can happen.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@JamesVanderhal2 @WSJPolitics Scary stuff. I just posted because I live in a province in Canada that should be an economic super power. I’ve seen what decades of over regulation does. The broken communities it creates when industry and good pay jobs leave is something people can come here and see first hand

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

Texas didn’t “make” SpaceX, Tesla, or the broader wave of oil, tech, manufacturing, and data-center investment. The policy environment did, the low taxes, lighter regulation, and lack of constant extraction that let companies actually operate and expand. Once they arrived and grew, they helped make modern Texas: the high-wage jobs, the construction boom, the tax base that funds roads and services, the population growth. It’s the industries that made Texas what it is today. Capital is mobile. Companies left California for a reason and they can leave Texas too if the environment flips.

I’ve watched the opposite play out in British Columbia. We should be a resource superpower forests, minerals, energy, ports, but decades of layering on permits, fees, consultation requirements, old-growth restrictions, and policy uncertainty have hollowed out the sector. Mills close or curtail. Harvests drop well below what the land can sustainably produce. Towns that once had thriving schools, hospitals, police, and clean roads become shadows of themselves. When the productive people and the companies leave, the government that always claimed it was “taking more for the people” is suddenly nowhere to be found. Services get cut, the tax base shrinks, and you’re left with the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. Prince George and a lot of other northern communities are living proof: what used to be solid, working places are now dealing with the fentanyl fold on the sidewalks, homelessness, and crime. The good people left. The ones who stay watch it degrade.

Industry is what creates the surplus for everything else. With the jobs and investment comes science, creativity, more capital, and the ability to actually fund long-term things, better hydro, real environmental work, fisheries restoration, forest management. Companies that plan to be there for decades are usually the ones carrying those costs. Kill the industry and you lose the capacity. Instead of that positive snowball you get the reverse: fewer high-paying jobs, less private investment, weaker communities, and a government that slowly retreats.

Texas has been walking a fine line and winning because it mostly stayed on the side that lets industry function. Oil, tech, manufacturing, and the related trades have created real prosperity. I’m an HVAC and refrigeration mechanic; I know project managers and tradespeople who chase the work. The money in Texas for skilled trades is among the best in the world, look at what Google and the big projects pay. Those aren’t just billionaire gains. When headcounts drop or facilities pull back because of new rules, uncertainty, or higher costs, it’s everyday wages, overtime, and secondary jobs that disappear first. Billions in project spending vanish and billions in household income go with them.

I’m not saying there should be zero rules. Externalities like water use, grid strain, and local impacts need some accountability. But the BC experience shows how the “just a little more regulation, just a little more extraction, it’s for the people” approach compounds. Each cut feels small and justified until the industry is no longer viable, the communities empty out, and the problems that were supposed to be solved get worse. Texas built a monster economy by not going down that road. It would be a shame to start.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@Hodlwithnoah @MichaelDell Man that’s so awesome to see!

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@SYBIXBT @coinbureau Defrost cycles. They use heaters to melt ice off the evaporator when manually over ridden on they essentially turn the insulated box ment to keep things cold into a sauna

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@Charlesvoicema1 @TheInsiderPaper Literal tons of waste water are dumped into the St Laurent River. Treated (still gross and full of chemicals) but if treatment facilities go offline I would recommend sourcing water from tributaries not any major river.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@Hodlwithnoah Never ! Lol those are dangerous 😅

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

Fair point and raises the question of where all the good people have gone. People use to make an honest living at a grocery store, worked there for years or decades held and passed down a standard but a separate issue to this that seems mostly gone. All about squeezing margins and cutting labour and wages. My honest take

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@Working0115 @HormuzLetter When overriding a defrost cycle like this, it’s just as easy to override or silence the temperature alarms in the same control system. These hackers clearly had a strong understanding of the setup and how to maximize damage

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@smerkinkones @HormuzLetter Sorry mis read your comment. But I agree

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@comrade_mog @DanEastman2023 @HormuzLetter I’m not an expert on the security side, can only say some companies put a lot more into it than others and what I do know is it’s not cheap at all. Will be very expensive I’m sure.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@smerkinkones @HormuzLetter Apparently it was danfoss. But I’m not 100% sure.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

I agree. The IT side of it moves away from my specialties but anything connected to the internet needs to be on a secure vpn. I think we have assumed for too long that hackers only want money or ID information, ignoring the possibility of wide spread destruction on critical infrastructure

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@JakeKnight2767 @HormuzLetter Fair point. No argument. Grocery stores need to take notice. This kind of food waste is scary but also upsetting

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

@JexiumIslandJem @ascshank @HormuzLetter Open facing ips rather than secure vpns, security from my experience was always focused more on separation to online shopping and payment information

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

Pretty sure they just weren’t properly secured. Most systems now sit behind VPNs. These were almost certainly open-facing IPs, which is stupid for a big chain. Remote access is still essential though. A tech needs to be able to get in and stabilize a system before driving to the store. The fix is locking that access down, not removing it.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

I’ve worked in commercial refrigeration for 20 years. It wasn’t that the temperature was set to 50°C. The attackers forced the cases into a prolonged defrost cycle instead of just turning them off. In freezers, defrost normally uses heaters or hot gas for 10–15 minutes to clear ice off the evaporator. If that stays on, temperatures climb quickly, which is how the cases got that warm.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

I’ve worked in commercial refrigeration for 20 years. These systems have used remote monitoring for decades so a tech can catch a failure overnight and fix it before product is lost. What happened here was someone forcing the cases into a prolonged defrost cycle instead of just turning them off. In freezers that means heaters or hot gas running way longer than the normal 10–15 minutes, which is how temperatures climb that fast.

The systems are online for a practical reason. The problem is a lot of them are still sitting on public IPs. A secured VPN so a tech can still get in when something’s failing, without the controllers being reachable from the open internet, is the minimum at this point.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

I’ve worked in commercial refrigeration for 20 years. These systems have used remote monitoring and control for decades so a tech can catch a failure overnight and fix it before product is lost. What happened in Europe was someone forcing the cases into a prolonged defrost cycle instead of just turning them off. In freezers that means heaters or hot gas running way longer than the normal 10–15 minutes, which is how temperatures climb that fast.

Disconnecting everything isn’t realistic for most stores. The practical fix is that these controllers stop sitting on public IPs. A secured VPN so a tech can still get in when something’s failing, without the systems being reachable from the open internet, is the minimum at this point.

[Mark Gordon @FieldTechMark]

You’re not missing much on this one. The attack caused a lot of spoilage and will raise insurance premiums for the stores that got hit. The difference is between one deliberate incident and the everyday failures that remote monitoring normally catches before product is lost. Both are real.

What should be non-negotiable now is that these systems stop sitting on public IPs. A properly secured VPN so a tech can still get in when something’s failing, without the controllers being reachable from the open internet, is the minimum at this point.