The disconnect between how systems "should" be and how they actually are is disappointingly enormous.

Retailers are surprisingly enough just like consumers and want things to "just work" without caring about security.

And so they get Internet-connected fridges, and it's all fine, until the very moment it isn't.

I hope this is a learning experience and they beef-up their systems.

Please stop with the acts of war or terrorism BS. The article also mentions "in-store pricing powered by electronic shelf labels" so lets not ignore this is about multi-billion companies trying to suck every penny out of our pocket. If these companies design and manufacture and buy stupid hardware that is susceptible to such hacking, they really deserve it. I mean they really do.

Second, this is a good thing. Systems will be hardened now. You think there would be any other fucking way they would upgrade their security unless something like this happens? Beatings will continue until security improves. This is why even chaotic hackers that cause damage and inconvenience are ultimately a positive force on our IT infrastructure. Think of it as an ecosystem and evolutionary pressure. Free marketplace of security models.

Also it’s madness that systems like these are connected directly to the internet without read-only permissions implemented.

Water systems in the US are, too. And they have been hacked.

Because this way the bill of materials, design work, and labor cost are all higher; and that way the company can earn more money!

Capitalism is so far detached from what capitalists pretend it's like. Wealth distribution is so uneven in the U.S. that there's extremely little incentive to lower costs, even if the business is worse off because of it.

I think Samsung had some sort of failed update that killed their refrigerators as well, makes you wonder.

Because shops don't want to run hardware on site, so they outsource the hosting of management and monitoring to the cheapest contractor. Unsurprisingly they don't spend on security.

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.

Well, this means the password is very often changed, so it is secure /s

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.

One can only hope

Remote monitoring 👍

Remote control 👎

David Attenborough butting in: "That's when they should have realized it, but did not. A fatal mistake."

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.

“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.

They will calculate that they spend less on recovering from these cyberattacks than they would on paying staff fairly, and carry on.

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.

We do, but companies are given a billion years to implement that because The Economy ™️