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Comment by calamari7063 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's that people who've never faced a security threat and never had to think to are among the most vulnerable. And grocery stores are notoriously thin margin businesses who actually strive not to spend unnecessary the most.

At least that's what I got from it.

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Ok, then why were their damned fridges connected to a network then?

"The chain wanted to have Internet enabled control and dashboards about their fridges" or something?

You don't get to say you want the perks of being Internet enabled and then turn around and say that protecting against the downsides would cut into your margins too much. Sheesh

Support is cheaper if the support agent can remote access your hardware instead of flying a dude out.

What kind of support does a goddamn refrigerator need that can be fixed over a network?

I would assume that ~100% of refrigerator based problems would require a new part to be installed, not exactly something you can fix over the network

Imagine instead you had 100 fridges and 3 walk-in freezers and 5 industrial compressors. Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?

Now imagine you had 50 such stores.

MPLS? Multi-site Domain? VXLAN? Absolute fantasies, can't be done.

But seriously, networked fridge systems are one of the most straight-forwardly practical use cases for networking tech to improve logistical latency in a supply chain. There are definitely lots of different solutions for securing it depending on scale though.

> Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?

Sure I would. And my very next thought would be "how do we secure that"

Obviously not the approach that was taken here

The fridge only need to push data to the board then, there is no reason the board can send commands, and even less commands that can ruin the ware.

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