Sorry, a kid in China tried to ssh into amazon.com, no shopping today!
After the ‘4’ incident my calibration for guessing if something like this is a joke is completely broken.
you set that root account to ‘no’ in the config, right?
… RIGHT??
Just how do you expect to move the plot along!?!?
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.
And disappoint it’s followers? I think not. Fridgie’s OnlyFans account has already surpassed it’s sale price.
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.
The profit cults have a different demand from logic and reality. They do not condone to its existence.
yeah god forbid we pay someone to keep an eye on shit. to tweak settings and make sure all our food doesn’t melt.
The people who work on-site can handle that
That’s… not necessarily true. It’s entirely possible that nobody wants to touch the freezer’s temperature controls because “I might mess something up” or “I don’t know how to do that”. It’s not unusual for a smallish grocery store to have a single employee with a functioning brain and that person isn’t always at work. Hell, sometimes there’s two and one’s on vacation in another country and the other one has a day off and can’t be reached by phone. And I’m not saying this to single out grocery store workers as dumb or anything like that, the same holds for pretty much every profession: Most people just switch off their brains at work, they do the exact tasks they’re supposed to do every day, and if they need to do something new, that’s an impossibility without serious hand-holding. Seen it in grocery store employees as well as software engineers and doctors.
But it’s true that the remote control itself doesn’t have to be available online, only monitoring does, you can always just send a technician to push the button and change the temperature. But then wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to send out a technician in the first place?
Worst comes to worst: print a few pages of instructions, laminate them and now you can get it done on-site
It’s not unusual for a smallish grocery store to have a single employee with a functioning brain and that person isn’t always at work.
this is why you build up competence and reward it with higher wages. every job being a dead end wage slave drone slot is one of the biggest problems in this country.
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.
Automation engineer here:
You should use a Perdue Model to locally network the fridges, and then have their temperatures and alarms and such go to a server that’s exposed (hopefully by VPN) to the internet
The level 1 devices should never ever be exposed to the internet
but that’s more expensive than just slapping an esp with wifi on there and telling it to connect to the fridge company server though
Well, the funny thing is the news in Germany reported theyre connected to the Internet to report issues…
And I’m here thinking okay why the fuck can you set the temperature then.
Also techies were shocked by the attack. No, absolutely not. Leaving stuff in the open like that…
It does make some sense at that scale.
If you’re managing 800 freezers, not only would you want statistics like that to catch any malfunctions, you might want to be able to control temperature or defrost cycles just for efficiency reasons.
They should be properly secure though. Infrastructure like that should only be accessible over a VPN while using a company managed computer.
Guaranteed there was someone in IT that flagged this as a potential risk and was told it would be too expensive to correct. Now there will be a push for inproved security for a couple months before middle managers start seeing all this unnecessary spending eating into their bonuses.
VPN isn’t going to magically fix it.
No, but it’s a start and pretty much standard security practice for internal or critical tools.
i have no actual evidence but i’m sure they didn’t hack the fridges themselves. they probably hacked into their central controller and instructed the fridges to heat up
I don’t understand “smart fridges”. There’s an ad I keep seeing about one that is just… stupid. It’s like the guy goes to the fridge door and instead of opening the door a little screen shows him what’s inside. Wow, so useful? I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge but I still think it’s dumb. Lol. Not every appliance needs to be “smart”.
I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge
That’s one reason. They can also track what you put in and take out to track the age of things for food safety. Notifying you of things that have been in there too long, or that you need to replace.
Since many people no longer use film cameras, they replace the old need to use a magnet to put a photo on the fridge. Instead able to just show a never ending slideshow of everything.
Replacing the old whiteboard or notepad for messages to the household.
Able to search and walk you through recipes on the screen itself, even notifying whether you have the ingredients on hand. to make something.
Letting you play and control music while cooking, or even making/receiving phone calls or even video calls on some models.
They are by no means necessary, but neither is your smartphone. 20 years ago a very tiny percentage of people had Internet on their phones. 30 years ago, few people had cell phones at all. Yet not having a smartphone nowadays is basically impossible while living in modern society, it is possible but nearly no one does it. All of it is about increased convenience.
Here’s the thing. Almost everyone has a smartphone because their utility is undeniable, even to folks who dislike them.
The smart fridge? There’s a little utility, but they’re never going to become ubiquitous like smartphones IMO. Most people are still fine with a regular fridge.
This is exactly why they are connected. Often through VPNs, meaning the hacks are getting into local area network traffic.
People are talking out of their ass, making all sorts of assumptions.
Aparantly we can assume that the control system for the fridges were connected to the internet, and I can’t really see the point of that.
Why not just have the monitoring system be sepaeate from the control system, I am sure you can monitor the system through external sensors to the control system.
Then you can get the alerts while the actual control system remains disconnected from the internet.
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.
So sure, call home and report, don’t provide a control mechanism that’s connected to the internet.
That’s my thought. If it was for reading only then it makes sense to have charting on them and make sure they’re working, but editing should have been a local only thing.
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.Usually for monitoring or control. I can see monitoring temps for example. Commercial refrigeration is no joke.
yeah but monitoring and controlling are two different things: you can have a monotoring system and e-mail / alarms going off in case of issues, and attackers can’t do shit but looking at temperature.
But when would you ever need to change the temperature remotely is my question.
They may run the temps lower during business hours to compensate for doors constantly being opened. That’s just one example. Remote control is fine, unsecured access is not not.
You don’t need remote control to set a cron job.
I asked this question before and I will ask again… What advantages do internet connected fridges have over non-internet connected? Automatically ordering groceries? That is bullshit. I will order what I want when I want it. And I have always gone to the supermarket to do so that except a few times during quarantine.
Adjusting the temp based on what is in there? Firstly what is in my fridge is no one’s business. I do not want my eating habits (or what I buy and forget to eat) to be known by some fridge company.
I cannot think of a reason to have a smart fridge. But I want to know what the reasoning is? More importantly, why it even needs a net connection.
This is about commercial fridges for supermarkets etc., which also don’t need to be connected to the internet, but the way they’re sold is that they’ll collect data for analytics and save on labour by being centrally managed so I get why business idiots go for it
