memes

I wonder if this is going to cause an increase in local networks for these kinds of things. If you have it on network not connected to the internet you solve like 99% of security issues.

As always, Capitalism is the issue. The problem is that grocery stores don't want to pay their employees enough to give them the job of routine temperature-checking. Nobody wants to do that tedious, boring shit for only $18/hr. So they outsource it to an outside company, that way they can pay one guy to monitor thousands of fridges across several stores, rather than give hundreds of employees a raise.

Why the hell does a fridge need internet access in the first place anyway?
Like I'm watching youtube videos on my freezer or some shit.

stupid thing is they will likely not work if disconnected from the internet.

They were connected by SCADA and managed locally by technicians. It was never meant to be exposed to the tsunami of the internet.

WE WANT JUSTICE NOT REVENGE!!!!! Justice

What "feds"? Those cases happened in Europe.

The only good reason I can think of for a fridge to be connected to the internet is to alert you to a compressor failure when it happens so you can get the food out of it.

Edit: I should have clarified that I meant consumer fridges, which I install for a living and so my brain defaulted to that. Commercial systems definitely need monitoring of some sort, and network access is the best way to centralize that.

Having worked in automation, OTSec adoption is in its infancy. SSO? SSL? Shared passwords everywhere, mostly root or admin. Usually walled garden approach, and once you're in, those apples are ripe for picking.

There's no good reason for temp control itself to be attached to the internet. The people who work on-site can handle that. There are always people on-site who stock the fridges and cleaning, etc., and the managers for those workers. These things aren't sitting alone in a building with no human oversight for miles around. Monitoring and logging can be centralized while air-gapping the actual control of the temp.

I have no doubt that's exactly what they're working on right now.

And disappoint it's followers? I think not. Fridgie's OnlyFans account has already surpassed it's sale price.

TBF: They call home when a unit needs maintenance; they can turn the temperatures up a little when the store is closed early or opens late. There's likely some ecological upside.

That said, a complete ruin of all the frozen goods probably wipes out years of cost-saving and eco-savings.

They are connected so they can be controlled and serviced from a central location. These aren't consumer fridges. These businesses basically hire a servicing company and even lease the fridges from those companies. It's more cost efficient then having a guy in each store that basically does nothing all day to fix the occasional problem. And waiting for a repairman to physically come in so they can just reboot or just change some parameters is also not ideal. The problem isn't that they are connected the problem is that people don't take internet security seriously. Like recently some Danish government server got hacked and data from citizens got stolen because a government worker didn't change the default password of his account.

Because they were designed with cloud first mentality, they are fetching the temperature 100 times per second to the server. In case of connection issues, they stop working.

Does this seen stupid? Yes. Did I make it up? Also yes. Is the true for a lot of consumer electronics? Yes.