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Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

That could be done by the servicemen or managers on-site. There is no reason at all to have remote control fridges. All this really does is make some higher up feel more importantl because they have a centralised controller, while providing very little real benefit.

Anything you might want to change with a freezer already requires someone physically there. It's like making a socket ratchet have a remote controlled direction toggle. Or a remote control button to light the inside of your money box on fire.

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The benefit is the same as making websites remote controllable. A person then doesn't have to drive in to flip a switch, which means fewer people are needed to operate more systems, saving the company money.

Presumably the grocery stores are already staffed by at least one employee capable of flipping a switch, no?

Stores are now installing e-ink price tags to save labor updating price labels. They're not going to turn back from centralized HVAC/fridge monitoring and control.

Unlike fridge remote control (note, not remote monitoring but remote control) e-ink price tags actually make a good deal of sense. The prices are already managed centrally so it reduces the labor to needing to accurately document which piece of hardware is at which shelf location as opposed to needing to manually check that each tag has the up to date price. (TBF OCR is now good enough and mobile SoCs now powerful enough that you could probably automate most of the traditional task but that wasn't historically the case.)

No they are doing it so that they can change prices more quickly and thereby extract more profit. Next (or already current) step is adjusting prices dynamically based on nearby customers.

Switch to do what? If food is in it you can't change anything. If food isn't in it then why is it running or why wasn't it defrosted when it was emptied?

If you home refrigerator could be defrosted remotely, in what scenario would you ever do that?

Agreed, logging temperatures without the ability to actively control the fridge seems a much better approach.

Our company makes IIoT gateway devices that log parameters from the system and push them to a read-only location. I've personally reverse engineered a dozen or so management protocols to get the data out because pretty much no vendor supports pushing temperature data to a centralized place. Those that have monitoring cloud software only support their own devices.

Every now and then our customers ask if we can add remote control for specific parameters but we've always turned them down, citing liability reasons.

Re: legacy Danfoss systems such as AKM, 720 and 850 there is no way to have read-only access (for different reasons in each case). I haven't been able to find weaknesses in the new 800A yet, but that's only because I have not had to try yet.

The vulnerability making the rounds in the comments is specifically in 800A: https://www.claroty.com/team82/research/freeze-the-controlle...

This sounds like someone (or someone's AI agent) saw the CVE and did a one-off drive-by attack instead of systematically targeting refrigreration systems and trying to find vulnerabilities.

The article is dated August 2026. Synacktiv (a different company) reported the very same vulnerability for older system managers/controllers already in 2023. Their report[1] says Danfoss told the products are EOL and should be upgraded. At no point did Danfoss fix the same issue in 800A. Typical.

Back in 2016 when we were integrating their 850 series system managers we encountered an issue with the HTTP API returning 400 series errors over slow links. We sent them PoC code written in Python 3. One month later they sent us an email, complaining that they first had to backport the PoC code to Python 2.7 as that was the newest version they could install. They also attached a "fixed" PoC code snipped where they had removed the artificial delays that did not trigger the issue. Danfoss never did anything to actively fix the issue.

One year later I browsed changelogs for the commercial RTOS that Danfoss used and realized the issue was fixed upstream in 2010 or 2011. That means their AK-SM 850 had at least six years worth of unfixed bugs.

[1] https://www.synacktiv.com/sites/default/files/2023-10/synack... (despite saying SM800, the firmware in question is for AK-SM 850)

Edit: The parent commenter seems to work at Danfoss on their Leanheat platform.

Alas, not anymore. Still got friends there though.

I worked with district heating, no idea what the cooling guys are/were doing. It's a big company.

In the recent heat wave being able to remotely tell which systems are about to fail helped quite a bit because you could take parts of the freezers offline to save the rest. There is no technician permanently on site at any of large retailer stores, you have mobile teams.

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