I can understand a lightweight IoT network to monitor temperatures and get alarms automatically. But why on earth would it allow controlling the fridge remotely?
Probably fof some remote control BS. My wife was really keen on being able to set up þe slow cooker and turn it on remotely while she was at work. I don’t understand þe appeal, but I’ve stopped trying to guess at why stuff appeals to people.
Also, when I bought our last dishwasher it came wiþ some features I only got because þe model got good reviews and I couldn’t get a version wiþout þem. One of þe ones I þought would be useless was an interior light þat illuminates it when þe door is opened. A year in, it was my favorite feature, and next dishwasher I buy is going to have it too. But when I was shopping, I could have cared less. Turns out, I’m really bad at predicting what features I’m going to like.
oh thank god. My brain has finally started automatically turning the symbol into ‘th’. That took forever.
Nope, not for me. Still hurting my eyeballs and brain.
I just skip the rest of the post as soon as I hit one.
Perhaps that’s how the fridge company keeps you paying for the service. Allowing you to set temps, time defrost is all operational. You can do power saving and make sure that defrosts only happen during the store’s downtime. You could also isolate a screwed up unit, have the store unstock it and shut it down until maintenance can come out to repair it.
It’s fucking stupid, you don’t use the manufacturer’s systems for that, or you’ll need one system for the fridges, one for the ovens, one for the lighting… You’re supposed to connect them all to YOUR control system, over isolated VLAN/LANs and then secure your system only.
Control systems will have to be air gapped going forward. This IOT fetish that the MBAs had is going to come back and bite a bunch of products in the ass.
Control systems need to be gated behind a properly secured SCADA server, then you can monitor whatever you want by connecting to your company’s VPN.
You need that if you want to let managers remotely control settings via mobile apps.
Next time, the manufacturer will learn to use a local-only protocol like Matter.
Idiot design and engineering for the sake of cheep managers. Same reason they are taking all the air gaps out of critical infrastructure. Instead of having Internet connected monitoring separate from the controls like a normal person, they hook controllers to the Internet too, so they don’t have to pay a technician to come in.
For added stupidity, the department at my job which has monitors and controls online just caused a number of techs who only do monitor and control to retire by making them return to work in office.
But you can whittle down your labor costs to a single untrained guy monitoring by notifications in the closet they converted to the IT room.
Having fridges connected to the internet and getting them Hijacked is stupidity, not a cyberattack.
Thanks a lot jackasses
Morgan Freeman Narrating: It was in that moment, they realized the IoT was a very, very dangerous idea.
Remote monitoring 👍
Remote control 👎
David Attenborough butting in: “That’s when they should have realized it, but did not. A fatal mistake.”
What’s missing from this report is more detail on how exactly this attack went down. Did the attackers compromise supermarket networks and manipulate the fridges through lateral movement within the network; or were the fridges accessible from the open internet? If the latter is the case (and there’s a non-zero likelihood they were): why the fuck?
I had a picture of the device since I was curious, but I spotted at Walmart, and some other stores, a Cellular/Wifi/BT gateway that was branded by some company providing facilities services. As far as I can tell, the device was intended to provide secure connectivity to some service provider. I found a similar device in the freezer section of another store.
I imagine that there is remote control/remote monitoring of all the freezers or other on-premise machinery (which, is a perfectly sound thing to do), but if the central provider doesn’t take security seriously, and stay on top of their systems operations, can easily be the target for any kind of attacks.
More practically, I suspect that everyone involved has insurance whose cost is much less than ongoing proactive security + maintenance of their systems, which is why these incidents don’t seem to instantly put these companies out of business.
Stuff like eWon routers are everywhere, they’re basically openvpn (thank you open source devs, of course we won’t contribute shit or share any of the money you made us) devices that connect to a bunch of central servers and allow you to tunnel to them. Compromise such a system and you’re spoiled for choice on what to hit.
Guess…
why the fuck
Because, despite us being in the Information Age, and computers surrounding us everywhere, only a very small portion of the population consider that learning how they work may be useful.
I’m sure if more people learned about how computers work, AI wouldn’t be a thing because they’d realize that computing-based tasks can already be automated without LLMs.
Tell that to my developer colleagues who are busy defining “skills” for the AI to do the mundane things our tools could already do. It may waste huge amounts of electricity, water and money, make us dependent on American megacorporations, cause their skills to atrophy, and be a gamble every time, but at least they don’t have to read the manual.
I assume because of the monitoring cloud-based IoT thing from Danfoss fridges were so comfortable to use. Ok, you don’t need it so often, but hey it’s a cool IoT feature.
They really put a “let everything rot” button in there?
It might not rot, they set it to 50°C, so some things might get sous vide 😅
Yes, they did. Keep the defrost button pressed.
That was a rather cold move.
Somebody learns the term “single point of failure” now…
I wonder how much money was saved by having someone manage the freezer section, or how much money was earned by not having an empty fridge.
The management quarterly meeting PowerPoint presentation says x3 more yachts for us.
Being “smart” and connected to the internet is about to devalue a lot of manufactured goods that have no business being either one of the those things.
One can only hope
Why the fuck does a refrigerator need to be on a network?
Controls have to be put somewhere, and networked interfaces mean fewer physical controls that may be difficult to access, tampered with or fail. Having a standard control protocol means interfaces can be changed and improved without modifying the hardware. They’re not a bad thing.
However, having networked controls exposed on anything other than private, air-gapped, wired-only LANs seems rather foolish, to me.
Speculation to your question, for monitoring and control.
For monitoring, log temperatures and send error message if it gets too high. Data could be used if any legal question come up about food spoilage.
For control, I’m guessing there’s times you want to shut it off or enable/disable defrost. Easier to do that at a computer than have controls that are either a pain inthe ass to get to, or too easy for some moron to mess with.
That being said, it should be on a local network and have no access to the internet. However a chain store would probably want the data sent to HQ, so the computer would need to be on the network.
Alright then, No more IoT refrigerators in my home.
We’re making sentient refrigerators that can’t keep food frozen.
Anyone ever worked with management and chatted about security on this stuff, they never wanna know. They never want to pay, its a line item of risk that is just a problem to budget or deadlines…that’s a tier three wish list item that we can deal with later. Surprise it never happens.
Being a manager is an invisible job. When everything goes smooth then ‘that’s just how it’s supposed to go’. When things break or get hacked the manager looks like they aren’t doing enough. Meanwhile manager responsibilities cover an unreasonable amount of work and stack up fast.
Managers can be in a good place work wise and then get 1 phone call that ruins their schedule for the week. When it rains it pours because then employees call out, some employees can’t get along so you have to deal with their high school drama, then someone needs a report, then there was an inventory supply or a computer/accoubt isnt working etc etc etc. At some point the manager has to say ‘this isn’t my company and I’m not going to put in a bunch of unpaid overtime (your salary and only get paid 40 hours a week. Anything over is you working for free instead of enjoying your personal life) to fix this’.
Just like the people they manage, managers aren’t very incentivized to sign up for their own big projects that don’t require their immediate attention. Managers might get a bonus for a job well done at the end of the year but is it really a bonus if they worked a bunch of unpaid overtime all year? Feels more like a partial refund to pay some of that time back.
Maybe they learned they need to air gap critical infrastructure, and leave the management to on-site humans who are paid well enough not to hold their inventory for ransom.
“Learn” hahahahaha
Did having centralized control and monitoring of coolers save a fake number of man-hours on a spreadsheet instead of paying a store employee already on the clock to check temperatures occasionally?
They’re going to keep doing it because the spreadsheet says the risk is worth saving those fictional man-hour costs.
I worked in an American grocery store for a while, and the employees, even the managers, did not take cooler temperatures seriously. They were eager to shrug off, make excuses for, anomalies. Because they were too busy, and a freezer meltdown (which happened as the result of malfunctions more than once) was a ton of work, a huge disruption.
Far from saving money, I’m sure an automatic monitoring and control system that raised an alarm at headquarters would have cost that store more money. But it also would have resulted in better monitoring. It would have done a better job than the people who were avoiding that job were doing.
Much later, I worked at an engineering sub-contractor for a hospital equipment manufacturer. One of my projects included adding automatic temperature monitoring and logging to some pretty simple OR appliances. Humans were supposed to be checking the temperatures of these things on a regular basis, but I got the notion that we weren’t trying to save staffing costs so much as we were trying to make sure the mandated monitoring actually happened. Who really has time to check the temperature of the blood cabinet every hour? When things get busy, that’s the kind of thing that gets skipped first. If anyone was even taking it seriously in the first place.
It decisions with skilled professionals not budget skimming project managers.
They will calculate that they spend less on recovering from these cyberattacks than they would on paying staff fairly, and carry on.
It’s smart fridges all over again.
They use Samsung fridges, interesting 🤔😂
