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.

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.

See, this is the kind of hack (if that's what it was) I can get behind. This is a military target of a nation that is currently at war. Fuck up their food supply all day every day.

But what is described in OP is just shitty.

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

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.

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.

Guess...

Hackers using AI can absolutely hack into a Tesla and make it do anything they want. I'm surprised they haven't to the point where it's major news.

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.

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.

“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.

It decisions with skilled professionals not budget skimming project managers.

One can only hope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMZ_(computing)

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.

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.

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.

Given the simplicity of this attack and complete disregard for security by the vendor, it is likely to just be a teenager in a basement somewhere

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.

The main plot of Ghost in the Shell 3. sigh

I'm sure the admins managing this infra did implement strict permissions... Separate vlans are safe until you find a vulnerability in the switch OS, or find a way to access the admins account.

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 ™️

There's nothing as far as I know, even in industrial settings. Some companies are better than others, and some fields are better than others, but at the low level everyone does whatever the fuck they want. Always-connected teleservice routers and similar devices are everywhere, with outdated firmwares just waiting to be hacked. It's improving but very slowly.

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

AI is absolutely incredible at finding vectors for arbitrary code execution. It can jump from layer to layer to layer to find an exploit. I want all of my appliances from now on to be dumb and not connected to the internet.

They use Samsung fridges, interesting 🤔😂

Who could possibly have an interest in fomenting chaos in Europe?

I guess it's a funny warning by a good guy. The message is "get your shit together now before an all-out war".

There's nothing funny about wasting this much food