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Comment by MiroslavPokorny | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is devices like this should NOT be connected to the internet and at worst air gapped. Theres no reason including cost that a separate computer just for the fridges etc is not sitting in the office of the supermarket. Pretty sure the destoyed goods and close time cost far more than the extra cheapo computer.

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Handling food related stuff, at least in my country, requires tracking and registering temperature for the fridge. It needs to be documented. Either you have a probe that you bring to computer to read data.. or you send it somewhere.

I don't know lot about fridge internet tech, but I can see that communication is needed to send this data. Having a hub to be able to do it is probably introduces complexity, but also maybe viable solution.

We had a blackout for a prolonged period of time (not 24hrs, but was 12+). Next day thee shop had all the freezers empty. If the "food and safety administration" on your audit catches that you still sold food when temp dropped under x for period of time, I bet you get into trouble.

You also get into trouble if you don't have records to show.

There is a very significant difference between _monitoring_ the equipment and _controlling_ the equipment. I get it why monitoring the equipment remotely provides a number of significant advantages, I'm in data analytics. I do not see how putting control systems online gains enough advantages to outweigh the risks. Fridges in a grocery stores is probably a weak example, but similar incidents with power systems, hospital/healthcare devices, and the like can actually endanger human lives.

There was far more serious incident very recently where hackers gained control or attempted to gain control of a propulsion system of an oil tanker. Resulting in a military operation to take it back. People need to start treating these risks more seriously.

Edit: Here's the link to the article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49954466

My belief is that is more about convenience than anything else.

It is also worth looking at why this is so, which most likely stems from the lack of technically inclined staff in every location and the cost of having a tech going from store to store everyday to deal with POS, back office computers, amd any other kind of device.

Now, can you secure all this? For the most part yes, but it is quite expensive to do it. Maybe they will do it now or they will go with “it cannot happen to us twice” thinking and not do anything substantial about it.

It's not just about having tech inclined staff, but just the whole staffing strategy in general. Most grocery stores et. al. try to staff as cheaply as possible and try to have their workers do as much as possible during their shift. This means that there's no extra time available that they're not shelving products, or sitting at the register.

Rather than have extra staff at the store to do stuff like monitor fridge performance, it's better to have them report stuff centrally and have someone or some tool monitoring thousands of fridges across the entire chain. This way you can send out repair teams and plan maintenance more efficiently.

There is a video game where you can unlock a thermostat which grants you extra points if you go back to it and readjust the temperature once in a while. Everyone hated it and kept mentioning just how ludicrous it is that a device called a "Thermal Static" somehow works by inputting thermal changes as opposed to thermal targets, prompting the developer to agree that was the stupidest idea they had and they would be changing it.

This game is nsfw.

Are you implying french fridge makers in real life are stupider than porn?

We all have fridges in our homes.

Why would managing fridge temps be a job that requires more than a few minutes a day at most ?

How hard could it be ?

Most fridges at home don't have hot gas defrost cycles, toxic Ammonia refrigerants and store tens of thousands of euros worth of food in at any time.

They usually require scheduled service teams maintaining them who have tight SLAs (because a supermarket without fridges loses a lot of money per day) so making sure you have remote access to it so you can bring the right parts with you is probably useful.

I suspect when you load a big fridge with lots of room temperature product (does that happen?) the fridge struggles to maintain adequate cold. Though that still seems like something the fridge itself could handle locally.

Surely, these fridges weren't doing inventory tracking? (Or were they?)

Don't forget the fridge is also opened probably 3 times a minute on average during business hours. The use profile is entirely different to home.

Exactly.

If a fridge is being opened frequently, the amount doesnt matter but lets pretend frequently means many times an hour, shouldnt a human be able to spot the fridge is warming up because it doesnt look or feel as cold as normally ?

Or perhaos they could look at a thermometer...

Sounds fun. Perhaps you would like to volunteer for thermometer duty at your local supermarket.

If there were actually people wandering around supermarkets manually checking fridge temperatures in 2026, everyone on HN would be saying how easy it it ought to be be to avoid all this pointless manual labor using modern technology.

Because being smart is not about avoiding work, its about failing well when things go pear shaped.

Its the same thign that separate good cars from the best. They both drive well enough at normal speeds in normal conditions. The best cars save your life when the others make you a cripple or dead in some unfortunate chance bad luck event.

Supermarkets operate on razor thin margins. They rely on being smart and avoiding work to make a profit. I don't think they are going to be persuaded to do a bunch of extra manual work, and tolerate increased electricity bills, just on the off chance that there's a once-in-a-generation cyber attack.

I think, in classic HN style, you're massively underestimating the complexity of a domain that you have no experience with. There's a whole academic literature on optimizing this:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=supe...

The software running on fridges should, obviously, be secure (just like any other software should), but air gapping the fridges, and winding the technological clock back a couple of decades, isn't a realistic proposal.

Fridges are manually checked where I work. And logged. It is very, very, pointless manual labor, but big.corp won't pay for an offsite solution. Approx 3,000 walk-in fridges across the company, about 1,000 of them also have walk-in freezers.

Home fridge, like all home appliances, is basically a toy version of the professional one.

You don't take into account more complex situations where retail store is managing remotely say 50,000 fridges, adjusting regionally based on local stock, temperatures, weather forecast, incoming holidays and probably 100 other factors that outsiders have no clue about yet it allows them to have those razor thin margins that keeps them afloat.

Current security model is clearly not adequate but it would be nice if folks recognized that world is more complex than ie their home situation or some very simple use case they can come up with in their head.

I'd be more worried about the site with one fridge cutting corners than the one with 50,000.

It's the complexity of the world which should drive you towards keeping this stuff offline.

Hell, I used to manage some VoIP switches which would hard-lock if you hit them with `nmap -A`. More people need to learn this lesson.

A single fridge can be managed with a manual maximum recording thermometer. It records the highest temp reached. Check it daily, if the high temp is over 40F, throw everything away.

The one good reason is that there is nobody skilled left in the office of the supermarket. The days of people with the skills to hit a supermarket HVAC system with a hammer are long gone. When the fridges are on the fritz, the minimum-wage shelf packer goes and packs shelves as far away from the fridge as possible.

If you connect them to the internet you can control them remotely, there is nothing wrong with doing that.

yes, but why do they need to be exposed to the internet?

So you can control them over a network that you are almost always connected to, even if you are at home or mobile

you can keep them on a VPN and connect to that VPN yourself from anywhere, without exposing them to the possibility of anyone connecting to them directly from the internet.

You are just exposing the application to the internet with extra steps in between

If the application is properly secured (strong encryption, strong authentication) there is no point for the VPN

and if the application isn't configured correctly, the vpn/internal network might not be configured correctly either.

The extra steps are useful to have here. Assuming the application implemented in some ad-hoc firmware is secure enough when there trivial ways to add another more standardized layer of defense is simply negligence.

These are two different things. For example, it is possible that the fridges connect to a central, more secure MQTT endpoint to report telemetry and receive commands. They don't have to be discoverable on the internet. Also, not setting up a VPN, given the fact these vulns were known for so long is pure negligence.

Or it should/could be connected, but in a read-only mode (eg monitor the data). And control could require someone on the location doing a physical button (pushing an "authorize command" button physically behind the fridge, or in a local control room, or something)

I don't think the company which installed the fridges would be tech savvy enough for that nor the supermarkets

Not tech savvy enough to push a button?

$1 charge for pushing the button. $999 charge for knowing which button to push.

I love customers that aren't tech savvy.

Of course it should be connected! Must be! How else would a manager sell customers data in real time to anyone who wants to buy it?

It's so boring to just sell fridges, let's spy on customers and sell that data! /s

Sad world of greedy things.

The shit will go on until those who makes such decisions start going to jail regularly.

Not only that its a stupid game.

How can the market support so many sources all selling customer data ?

The price has to crash because of the inbalance of data vs customers.

Source they were selling this fridge data in real-time? Can you post a link where I can buy it?

What customer data is this even giving me? How do I get someone's personal information based on the temperature of the drinks fridge in Store #138 in Nantes?

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