These freezers are manually stocked and cleaned. If they need to be powered down it's a simple matter of a hardware switch that you flip when the unit is empty.
Brexit was the first to burst and despite their support of Ukraine, can at any moment capitulate to the ghost of nationalism and delusional escapism that is "white power". Americas on the verge of sinking further into the same. With those two entirely preoccupied, of course europe is next and already has the same underlying current.
I'm quite sure your average American company is just as willing to plug random shit into the internet.
Hell, there are probably hundreds of reports out there of American companies failing to secure their AWS S3 buckets, so you don't even have to plug anything into the internet.
I now read some interviews with local chains in Sweden and Finland, and they were still just investigating what to do at this point.
If I put a Zigbee thermometer in the freezer they can hack it all they want, but I am pretty sure they will not be able to set the temperature to 50C.
1. Connecting them was probably considered best practice when they were installed in 2005 2. Their support contract required them to stay connected
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/icas-kylar-och-frysa...
I wish commenters (in general) would do a bit more "steelmanning" before asking questions about why something is (in this case) connected to the internet.
> It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty.
(... in hacker forums)
but what about the deranged (and very prediction market–brained) version of this idea: the government develops ransomware, in a manner functionally similar to towing cars or confiscating illegal items, and uses it against companies in proportion to their revenue and obviously puts the money towards improving the ransomware
"the r in rsi stands for…"
i'm not sure it's something i want to see, but i don't know if it's impossible for it to actually come to pass or merely unlikely
(of course, cross-government versions of this are much more likely to come about but not as ransomware)
Hackers can still tamper with the telemetry and create false reports of problems, but actually changing the thermostat settings would require local access, so there's opportunity for somebody to verify the problem really exists.
- Remote alerting for the store manager/head office to quickly respond to a refrigerator failure after hours, providing options for saving valuable stock (e.g. move stock to another refrigerator).
- Maintaining an audit trail for cold chain management (e.g. regulator says you must keep an audit trail proving that a frozen fish has been kept below 30oC since it was processed on a ship all the way up to point of sale in a supermarket).
- Refrigerator manufacturer says a condition of warranty is that the refrigerator must provide remote telemetry proving some warranty condition has been met (e.g. regular cleaning cycle operated).
Note: all these speculated reasons are unidirectional data flows. So even if a valid reason exists for Internet connectivity, why can't it be limited to unidirectional data flows?
I believe gigantic fines are appropriate. They need to be of a size where the entire management team has significant financial issues for many years to come, even after having sold their houses, big cars, etc.
Nothing will improve until there are personal consequences.
Why the heck would this be necessary? We have VPNs holy crap, the entire genesis of the technology was to solve this fucking problem. If it's not literally intended for the general random public to be able to randomly visit and use themselves, it shouldn't be exposed on the public internet it should be (heavily restricted) LAN-only with remote access done via VPN. While it's even better if every single last thing is well secured at the client-level too, it goes a long way with ancient (or new, but with ancient-equivalent software design expenditure/decisions) kit to protect it at the network level.
Creating a false binary of "take it offline!" when businesses have very good reasons for networking many classes of industrial hardware seems self-defeating vs "just get the cheap bare minimum basic network protection done". I mean shit, even if somehow they've gotten suckered into freezers which demand access to a non-self-hostable manufacturer server (hey EU! here's something useful to regulate! if nothing else order manufacturers to have WireGuard end points for connection) they could at least have the firewall allow !RFC1918 solely and exclusively to that address on those ports.
noja•46m ago
kleiba2•43m ago
mariopt•10m ago