I know you’re being sarcastic. But for anyone coming here with a damaged irony sensor: no. Setting up a VPN comes at zero software costs (it’s all open source software, unless you’re keen on getting ripped off by some proprietary product) and a reasonably low cost in man hours for setting it up (we’re talking single-digit to low double-digit hours here).
Setup expenses look bad on the quarterly report. Losses later, if they happen at all (who knows if the engineers are so into their tools they forget the real world and I, the genius CEO, need to bring them back to reality), are problem for later.
Yeah, but you would think they would have gotten them off the Internet after the first time this happened, even if it means having to hire an extra person to keep an eye on them.
You want to monitor and perhaps automatically fix temp fluctuations? Maybe these things are smart enough to report parts about to fail? 🤷🏼♂️ But in any case it would be child’s play to make these things bulletproof.
One example: Set the local firewall to block all WAN traffic, all ports, to the freezer group (VLAN) except where the origin packet is the monitoring IP. I suck at networking and could work this out in an afternoon. Give me a week and I’ll have a deployment script for all the local firewalls, tested and ready to push the button. And again, I suck.
You don’t need an Internet connection to have a control system keep temperature around a setpoint, though. That’s usually handled by a lower level circuit that will continue to operate in the case that the high level interface is not responding.
Observability is nice, but you don’t need to expose controls to do this, you could just have a Prometheus endpoint.
I suspect it’s because the manufacturer is trying to sell RaaS (refrigeration as a service) and to ensure they get their monthly dues, they “offer remote maintenance and monitoring” or something.
I suspect your suspicion is accurate. Scanning with BLE or a flipper shows the coolers at my local grocery also. It’s like the cars, they won’t secure it until someone makes it and even then they’ll secure it against their customers freedom, not hackers.
Really, this is worth just 5 minutes of research. This is not like the stupid Samsung fridge you keep in your home. In commercial settings you may have hundreds of refrigeration units to track and manage in order to keep food safe. And it’s quite plainly very efficient to do this with remote management software, and yes this can be deployed locally with a local server to manage everything but it can also be done over the internet to cloud services and that can be much more feasible for someone who is trying to run a grocery and isn’t a network engineer or experienced server administrator.
I know someone will just say come on, it’s not that hard. To which I say fine, but the question here was why would anyone ever do this. There is actually an answer.
which once again begs the question. why the fuck is your freezer connected to the internet
Yeah. And VPN connections exist so maintenance and monitoring can take place without direct exposure. But alas…
Yeah but that’s expensive to set up and C-Suites need more bonuses so
I know you’re being sarcastic. But for anyone coming here with a damaged irony sensor: no. Setting up a VPN comes at zero software costs (it’s all open source software, unless you’re keen on getting ripped off by some proprietary product) and a reasonably low cost in man hours for setting it up (we’re talking single-digit to low double-digit hours here).
Expensive? I bet it’s less expensive than losing all your frozen inventory.
That requires forethought though, you’re giving c-suites too much credit.
Setup expenses look bad on the quarterly report. Losses later, if they happen at all (who knows if the engineers are so into their tools they forget the real world and I, the genius CEO, need to bring them back to reality), are problem for later.
Yeah, but you would think they would have gotten them off the Internet after the first time this happened, even if it means having to hire an extra person to keep an eye on them.
Nit: it doesn’t beg the question (a logical fallacy also known as tautology), it raises it.
But yeah, is it really that helpful to network something you only want to set one time?
Actually, “beg the question” is a linguistic fossil from a time when “beg” didn’t mean quite the same thing it does today.
You want to monitor and perhaps automatically fix temp fluctuations? Maybe these things are smart enough to report parts about to fail? 🤷🏼♂️ But in any case it would be child’s play to make these things bulletproof.
One example: Set the local firewall to block all WAN traffic, all ports, to the freezer group (VLAN) except where the origin packet is the monitoring IP. I suck at networking and could work this out in an afternoon. Give me a week and I’ll have a deployment script for all the local firewalls, tested and ready to push the button. And again, I suck.
You don’t need an Internet connection to have a control system keep temperature around a setpoint, though. That’s usually handled by a lower level circuit that will continue to operate in the case that the high level interface is not responding.
Observability is nice, but you don’t need to expose controls to do this, you could just have a Prometheus endpoint.
I suspect it’s because the manufacturer is trying to sell RaaS (refrigeration as a service) and to ensure they get their monthly dues, they “offer remote maintenance and monitoring” or something.
I suspect your suspicion is accurate. Scanning with BLE or a flipper shows the coolers at my local grocery also. It’s like the cars, they won’t secure it until someone makes it and even then they’ll secure it against their customers freedom, not hackers.
Exactly! It should have a single non-internet connected computer per supermarket controlling the temps.
Nope. Just raises it.
Really, this is worth just 5 minutes of research. This is not like the stupid Samsung fridge you keep in your home. In commercial settings you may have hundreds of refrigeration units to track and manage in order to keep food safe. And it’s quite plainly very efficient to do this with remote management software, and yes this can be deployed locally with a local server to manage everything but it can also be done over the internet to cloud services and that can be much more feasible for someone who is trying to run a grocery and isn’t a network engineer or experienced server administrator.
I know someone will just say come on, it’s not that hard. To which I say fine, but the question here was why would anyone ever do this. There is actually an answer.