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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

> It's not immediately obvious to me why fridges in supermarkets need remote control

I don’t know to what degree control is needed, but remote supervision of cold holding temperatures is good to make sure food doesn’t spoil. Most places that don’t have networked fridges have staff manually logging the cold holding temperatures to make sure things are working.

Again, though, I don’t know about making changes though.

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In this case it's not like the devices were turned off, they were put on "defrost" which means heating up to 50°C (122°F). Why would you need the ability to remotely set all your fridges to defrost??

One possibility is that it’s maybe useful for the fleet operator to be able to remotely update firmware and the attacker used that.

The other, more likely, answer is that there’s a diagnostic mode that allows raw control of the system and no one bothered to require physical presence to enable service mode.

With remote firmware update capability, at attacker could easily brick the entire fleet. With just service access it could be possible but would be more complex.

I remember having to do this every few hours 25 years ago when working at a store part-time as a student.

Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.

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