Zscaler highlights exposure of refrigeration controllers despite available patches

Zscaler’s Team82 has disclosed 23 vulnerabilities in Copeland’s XWEB Pro refrigeration controller and three in Danfoss’s AK-SM 800A, with fixes available since February and 2025 respectively. However, thousands of management interfaces remain exposed to the public internet: a Shodan query on August 19, 2026 found 3,726 Danfoss units, while Team82 counted roughly 2,800 via Censys.

The researchers demonstrated that an attacker who can reach the management interface can bypass authentication and execute commands as root, potentially manipulating temperature readings while disabling cooling. The gap between patch availability and application is particularly wide in food, pharma, and cold-chain sites, where a bad maintenance window can cost product, not just uptime.

Zscaler argues that restricting network reachability to these controllers, rather than relying solely on patching, is key to managing risk in these environments.