Hey, that’s not cool! 😡

That’s hot. Oh, hot!

with a spokesman saying that another 100 shops were urgently disconnected from the internet to prevent the same thing happening to them.

Maybe… just maybe, I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out here. Maybe they shouldn’t have been connected to the internet in the first place?

But then how would they generate all that lovely bitcoins?!

They’re connected to the internet so they can alert someone when they fail.

You can have online monitoring without putting the controls online. Online controls are profoundly dumb but these big chains like it because it means that no one onsite actually needs to know how the equipment works. I’ll take an old school mechanically controlled refrigeration rack any day over one where I need to navigate a fucking phone tree with the management company to get a setting changed.

But why would it need a password if it’s polled or dropping it’s temp read to a central monitor? Sometimes these hosts have way too many “features” for no thought out reason.

I worked at a security company and one guy called the SNMP community string its “password,” and it pissed me off. I just had to bite my tongue. They also stored a backup password in the Windows global environment, which also pissed me off.

… or kept default passwords lol

Let’s spend millions in tech, and more millions in spoiled food, just to avoid having to hire an employee to occasionally (among other job duties) make a round and check all the fridges. Corporate logic!

Even easier. You can still have the monitoring system online. Just don’t put the fucking controls online. To be fair to the store owners though, the controls companies push hard “everything in one place” online portals for their equipment now a days. But, if you ask me, your monitoring system should be entirely separate from the control system. That adds a bit of redundancy in case of faulty sensors. I’ve seen it plenty of times before where a misplaced temp sensor for the control system will cause a case to run too warm or too cold without anyone knowing because they’re only looking at the temp shown on the main controller. The temp sensor you’re monitoring shouldn’t be the same temp sensor that’s controlling the system.

They literally connected these fridges to the internet without even changing the default password.

If they change it off the default password then you would need someone to actually remember the password or at least write it down somewhere. Every time I have to factory default a controller because nobody knows what the password was set to I lose a little more will to live. Luckily, the admin credentials are usually just written in marker on the control panel right next to the controller in question.

Fuck those fridges.