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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

That class of risk was just theoretical for decades, so the price on it was basically 0.

Now that we see large scale incidents will there be an actual money value associated with upgrading systems and security for supermarket appliances.

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I think it's fair that the price up until now has been mostly zero. On the other hand you can 10+ years of examples on HN of people saying these types of threats with IoT devices and internet connected industrial hardware are not theoretical and it's shocking they weren't being exploited more often.

I can find 10+ years of examples on HN of people saying all kinds of stuff, and it's shocking how outlandish that so much of it is.

The thing I can‘t wrap my head around: why does a freezer need internet access at all? My freezer at home works just fine without. I bought it 20 years ago. Worst case in the supermarket: a freezer dies on Saturday night, you throw away the goods on Monday morning and call someone capable to fix it. Lowest TCO solution.

My random guess: freezer need temperature audits and franchise supermarkets have to prove they're properly managing the food. If the central monitoring service can also alert/dispatch staff within minutes to deal with issues, it becomes a pretty attractive proposition.

Something that might not be obvious, but temporary dips in temperatures also need to be monitored as it's enough to spoil the food. Worse case scenario isn't to have to throw 50~100 kilos of food, it's to have spoiled food still looking fine and consumers ending at the ER, with the whole franchise name on the news.

> My freezer at home

That can't be your frame of reference for a business entity part of a franchise.

There are better (and offline) solutions to detect temperature dips in the freezer (e.g. a thermograph, or cheaper, solutions that change color). And as a former trucker delivering frozen and refrigerated goods I can tell you the most dangerous part of the journey to the customer is not in the freezer of the POS. That being said, I admit I don’t know the legal requirements today. But I doubt someone will be sent out at night to salvage a few pounds of frozen spinach.

On better solutions managed locally, yes of course. Small shop's also deal with the same requirements without keeping their stuff online.

> someone will be sent out at night

We're talking about France, so that's an even lower chance of happening for a freezer's worth of goods.

The two upsides I'd see are the ability to throw away the food next day before opening the shop, and the franchise being able to force that procedure even if the local shop would have chosen otherwise.

Local tenant are usually a lot more lenient than their franchise manager (for good reason usually, but there's always that tension)

and the price of everything will go up as well to pay for it. Your $2 bag of flour becomes $4 because of security costs

this is sad. its like tragedy of the commons. you could have lived in a village without thieves and you dont need a lock. but as soon as there is one thieves, everyone in the village now need to have locks. you could have all your servers without security in a village with social trust but the moment you have evil actor everyone must now have security expenses that do not add functionality just to fight that single pathogen.

so the expensea are related not to amount of adversaries but to amount of things you need to protect. because its enough to have one bad guy to inpose expenses on whole village.

It will shortly become a national security issue.

Russia is feeling the pain of having their warehouses blown up.

There will be tons of budget for having things ‘blow up’ themselves.

That is a dangerous game, especially when affecting food supply. Widespread cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are deemed grounds for nuclear response in most national doctrines. This obviously is way out of scale, but concerted widespread efforts by decentralized groups could end up triggering ww3 by accident. Not when they try to play a game of chess, but when they shut down a water treatment plant, and some other unrelated group shuts down gas pumps, and suddenly there are millions of people with no fresh water and no fuel to get it to them...

Yup. Plenty of proxies to attack through first, of course.

Cold War, part Deux - the cybering?

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