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Comment by grebc | Hacker News Reader

It’s a supermarket, staff will be stocktaking, restocking, walking past A LOT.

True, but they'd need to be specifically checking a thermometer or it might warm up a fair bit before being noticed.

It’s kind of a low-grade risk though, don’t you think? I imagine it’s unlikely we’d see major changes over “some stores lost a few hundred grand due to a cyber attack”.

I suppose it could expand, but even still, there’s plenty of non-perishable foods. It would be annoying at worst, but maybe never outright dangerous?

It is not a low grade risk at all, these represent extreme health risks to the customer.

It may be some time before staff notices a unit is heating up. And if customers aren't paying attention and grab something biologically fragile like milk they could get food poisoning that could hospitalize you for days.

Food needs to be at room temperature for 8 hours before it’s considered spoiled. These are refrigerated products, surrounded by tons of thermal mass (other products) in often enclosed or highly efficient spaces. You’d need people to not notice that every single package they touch in the freezer is literally room temp for a full workday before this starts causing mass poisoning. Not sure that’s reasonable.

Any industrial fridge, even many home fridges, have a sound alarm if some temperature threshold is reached. It is trivial to _send_ alerts if the threshold is crossed. What is less common is remote control.

E.g. the -80°C's in our lab are all naturally air gapped: the monitoring system is send-only.

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