Something that probably shouldn’t have been online in the first place.
I don’t know. I have a chalet. Once I went there and the smell was horrible. Fridge stopped working and all the frozen food was rotten. I know it wasn’t a power outage because I’d have been alerted. So, if I could’ve been alerted that the fridge was not working, I could’ve saved the food and, maybe the fridge itself.
I can see the value in a monitoring system connected to the internet. “Hello, this is your fridge. Something is wrong”. Yes.
But what is the benefit of being able to control the fridge’s temperature remotely?
Cost. The company that provides the fridges doesn’t need to maintain as big a fleet of maintenance personnel nor as geographically tight (fewer people can cover larger areas). Instead they can have fewer engineers, and only send them on site for a smaller subset of problems, and less frequent (or less involved) annual services. Everything else they can monitor and maintain remotely.
Cost savings are almost always about having less people on the books, and flying by the seat of the pants. And then when something goes massively wrong - like someone hacking all your refrigerators - its too late to realise it actually carries bigger risks and may end up costing way more.
You could have simple temperature measure + alert
In this case the shops had all fridges with full management interfaces directly connected to internet
The problem is not the broken fridge.
The problem is the mindset of being able to control all and everything to get absolute security. Sure, get yourself webcams, lot appliances, 50 insurances, a tank for a car, guns, strong police and a big beautiful wall.
Thing is: There is NO absolute security. Never was and never will.
Why does a freezer need to be able to reach 55°C?
Defrost mode? That’s all I got.
Forcing defrost mode is exactly how this works iirc.
I would guess they can’t reach that temperature, and setting the thermostat that high effectively turns it off.
Why does a freezer need to be on a network, let alone a publicly accessible one?
deleted by creator
Danfoss said some systems targeted in the Netherlands remained connected to unsecured networks and were still using default passwords.
Speculating, but I would imagine the attackers were able to either override the settings using default or easily guessed passwords, or perhaps even replacing the firmware or programming to spoil the food. Industrial controllers are not the most secure devices. That world is due for a reality check.
The part that irritates me the most is the wasted food. I sorta feel more upset about that than I do random acts of violence just because I’m not conditioned for this to be normalized like with violence. What an effed up statement that is.
Time to play Ivan or not Ivan.
In my home the washer dryer and fridge both have internet connectivity. Not my purchases…, never connected them, I was like “ha, yeah, I’m a sucker, i’ll hook them up to internet right now”.
I would think that a billion-dollar supermarket chain would be staffed by people smarter than me, but I guess not? and that’s a low bar
p.s. The fridge model I have just recently “shut down” with an update and a lot of people lost their food… this was reported and well known. So that should have been some kind of heads up for them, no? Sad
One would think if even a dumbass like me could secure those fridge connections back to the monitoring station, that someone would have got all over that after the first attack.
My guess is people who export food to Europe did this to export more food
As a guy who exports frozen food to Europe.
Meanwhile, someone’s sitting at home with a wide smile on their face, hearing this news as they listen to their 1948 Norge Self-D-Froster chug along.
