Temperature soars at Swedish grocery store freezers, one store blames hackers
reuters.comhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506 First American military commissaries
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055304 Then chains in France
While it's unfortunate that it's happening, if a large portion of your inventory depends on regulated temperature, perhaps you should've disconnected your refrigeration from the internet by now?
While I totally understand the need of remote controlling some kind of freezer units, please explain for me, why on the earth do a grocery store need online freezers? The shops are usually open and have on-place human staff 7 days a week, 10-16 hours a day.
Centralized monitoring, so you can check if the local staff are doing their job properly, and in an ideal world, detecting performance degradation so you can schedule maintenance before they break.
Sounds legit, thanks! I am wondering then what is a good solution for this kind of issues? A physical switch on the freezer that enables/disables remote control over remote monitoring? However the operators will leave this switch on for convenience.
On site stuff likely paid minimal wage and not trusted change a freezer settings. Centralized management is cheaper (until it's not). But there are many ways to do it more secure than connecting the device to the internet and allowing incoming connections from any IP (how likely it was done).
The article is about Sweden so no they aren't on what other parts of the world would call minimum wages.
Why would you design a freezer to be set to 50 degrees Celsius?
> One Swedish store on Monday said on social media that the temperature of its refrigerators and freezers had been set to 50 degrees Celsius (122 F), similar to the attack in France.
Defrosting.
That said, there is no reason for that to be remotely activated. You need to empty the freezer first anyway. I’ve had this same fight dozens of times, and with things that could directly kill people.”But we want to be able to update software remotely, and control (dangerous feature) via software.” The only reason iI’ve been able to push back on it is due to mandated hazard logs, which won’t pass with the above implemented.
Seems to be happening in Belgium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334672