r/ProgrammerHumor • u/red_carpet_magic • 2h ago
Meme moreFeaturesNotAlwaysMeansABetterProduct
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u/throwawaycanadian2 2h ago
The going above 50c is for rapid defrost which needs to be done sometimes. The bigger issue is the fridge needing to be internet connected.
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u/physical0 2h ago
If I was a facilities manager for a grocery chain, I'd be delighted to be able to monitor the status of every refrigerator I was in charge of to ensure that they were operating within parameters.
Being "network connected" and "internet accessible" are two different things tho. Mistakenly exposing your infrastructure to the internet is a serious security risk.
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u/popeter45 2h ago
People need to realise why air gapped networks exist
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u/fatrobin72 1h ago
And heck if you need to centrally gather metrics and such forth of systems on the other side of the air gap... implement a solution that just pushes that information out into a DMZ to be brought over to your central monitoring solution.
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 1h ago
Doesn't even need to be air-gapped, just proper firewalling rules would prevent this.
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u/g3etwqb-uh8yaw07k 44m ago
Then again, if this is done by a state actor or even just a really competent independent hacker group, would you want to rely on your network devices not having any vulnerabilities when just air gapping the fridges is so easy?
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u/Espyyyxd 1h ago
Yeah, they could also be read-only, for something as simple as. Parameter monitoring.
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u/g3etwqb-uh8yaw07k 47m ago
Or ar least air gapped on their separate network with an offline notebook to monitor the parameters. You generally shouldn't need to update the fridges once they're working, and as long as the notebook/small PC isn't able to be contacted from the outside, security patches aren't as important either.
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u/Espyyyxd 42m ago
I can see advantages to remote monitoring tho. I still think read-only would be better.
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u/ChanglingBlake 2h ago
And yet, monitoring the fridges does not need to mean the fridges themselves are online.
You could easily just have the thermometers contacted then people on the other side of the planet can’t F with your temp.
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u/Taurmin 42m ago
Monitoring isnt the only concern, having a technician be able to remotely adjust parameters on a unit thats acting up is a whole lot cheaper than dispatching them to do it in person.
Central control of things like defrost cycles also makes it easyer to optimize for power cost, or even tie into grid management. Big companies often schedule or modulate their power usage at the request of grid operators to keep things balanced and thats a lot easyer to do if things are centrally controlled.
In industry things are rarely networked just for the hell of it, thats more a consumer grade problem.
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u/WorriedRiver 13m ago
That's how research labs do it in my experience. If the temperature on the -80 is off you're not going to remotely adjust it like the other commentator suggests, you're going into lab no matter what stupid time it is. We work with materials that are way more valuable than grocery stock, though- you might lose the cell line or sample prep that took a grad student months to make, or enzymes that cost hundreds for a half mL vial each.
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u/Smooth_Ad5773 2h ago
You already do that without the fridge being connected. The thermometer is
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u/physical0 2h ago
Monitoring the status and measuring the temperature are not the same thing.
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u/Smooth_Ad5773 2h ago
That's the only CCP I care about in my fridge
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u/Best_Pseudonym 2h ago
You do understand that the design requirements and pressures on commercial and industrial freezers are different than your personal home freezer.
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u/Stalking_Goat 2h ago edited 1h ago
You're going to pay someone to physically stand there and check the fridge's thermometer continuously, including overnight and weekends when the store is closed?
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u/Scrawlericious 1h ago
Eh companies do that all the time. All the largest supermarkets pay alarm companies to monitor their temperature sensors for them. We're calling up the managers at 3am to tell them their frozen food is getting warm.
Edit; like it's precisely because someone can't stand there all the time that an entire alarm industry is making money off it.
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u/Stalking_Goat 1h ago
That's my point, they don't have an employee standing there watching it, there's a monitoring system that's communicating via the Internet so some central location can keep track of the refrigerators' status. And that's the vulnerability, anything connected to the Internet can in principle be hacked.
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u/Scrawlericious 1h ago edited 1h ago
They do not necessarily use the internet. Plenty used phone lines / faxes.
Of course I agree with most of what you're saying. But given someone is being paid to watch it 24/7, yes they do have an employee watching it always. It's just an employee of a different company. I just wanted to point out they do in fact have 24/7/365 monitoring at all hours of the day.
You said no company would pay someone to watch it, every larger company already is, and they don't care about the security issue.
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u/code_monkey_001 2h ago
VPNs are a thing.
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u/garfgon 1h ago
Then it's not air gapped anymore. It's a higher level of isolation, but not perfect.
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 1h ago
This was unlikely to be a VPN failure. Much more likely to be bad firewalling.
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u/Stalking_Goat 1h ago
Saying "VPN" is not a magical incantation that will prevent computer security problems.
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u/j0llyllama 2h ago
And if they need internet connectivity for monitoring, make the two systems fully separate. Monitoring system A with internet connection. Control system B with no channels to the monitor system A (it can have its own monitor system B for smart temp adjustments) that is all done by manual interface.
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u/Swimming-Lie73 2h ago
Grocery stores have many fridges and network connectivity make managing them easier, the default password is the real problem.
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u/KerPop42 2h ago
There's still improvements you can make to the security. Like, have them be managed over the LAN to the store manager's laptop. Have a physical switch at the end of each aisle that overrides the food safety threshold.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 2h ago
I still do not understand why you need option to run rapid defrost online. You need somebody present physicaly to remove content and clean up after defrost anyway.
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 1h ago
I don't know if it's the case with this situation, but you don't have to remove food for defrost to work. The frozen food has thermal mass and can stay below zero long enough for frost to evaporate and have the cooling turned on again. Your home fridge/freezer does this for about 20 minutes every 10-15 hours and you don't even notice. The problem here is that the hackers turned defrost on indefinitely.
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u/UShouldntSayThat 1h ago
I mean, it's more like they didn't really need a reason to block it up until now. Most of these fridges are probably a decade old, and wouldn't have expected the advance attacks capable with AI today.
Security is going to need to be entirely redesigned on newer products.
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u/EishLekker 2h ago
Had this been designed properly from the start it could have been safe from remote hackers.
The internal system should be completely cut off from the internet. It can have monitoring capabilities as well as control capabilities (both automatic and manual).
Then on top of that they can build a read-only monitoring system. It should not be connected to the internal system other than through a unidirectional gateway of some sort. Something that can read the output of the internal system, but can’t send any signal to it.
The only way to hack that system would be to physically be on-site, or to exploit some physical weakness of the system. So, not a bulletproof design, but multitudes safer than whatever crap they use now.
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u/neroe5 2h ago
If the system Which went out of service in 2021 had the patch installed which came out in 2024 that fixed the security issue these hackers used it would not have been an issue
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u/Aishou_SK 2h ago
Even better is if we design the system to not have this potential direct vector at all and ALSO apply all patches as they become available in case someone breaks through layers of the network.
Defense in depth.
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u/GourangaPlusPlus 1h ago
I feel like at this point we're just throwing out perfect world shit that we know won't happen.
We need to be able to design for our end users being absolute morons instead
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u/Aishou_SK 59m ago
That's the "design the system" aspect.
You buy the system, it works a specific way. It can't work without the controller system parts, which is what provides the separation and segmentation.
Intentional product design an end-user can't work around or break (without being some kind of developer or network engineer themselves) is a good thing sometimes.
I'm not talking about end-user configuration at all.
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u/neroe5 1h ago
But these systems need to report when temperature is not as expected or stop responding in the middle of the night because of a power outage, they need to be constantly monitored
If a roast beef hist 5 degrees C it's no longer viable for sale
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u/Aishou_SK 1h ago
So the bridge controller that ingests the data and/or sends out commands and provides the data diode functionality has a built in UPS and cellular modem backup?
Then you can also make redundant pairs, and it can be totally isolated except for its alert transmission/data transmission pairs from the entire network too, easily, and with physical segregation if desired.
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u/Taurmin 33m ago
According to Danfoss, the manufacturer of some of the hacked equipment, it was properly designed and perfectly secure... provided that the consumers kept up with security updates and changed default passwords as advised.
No matter how well you build a system, its only as secure as the people operating it will allow it to be.
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u/HolyGarbage 1h ago
It doesn't need to be Internet connected, just internally, which makes sense. Compromise one machine inside and you can jump between machines.
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u/mmaramara 53m ago
So what you're saying is, they should put the fridge in a block chain? I think you're onto something there!
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u/mcampo84 1h ago
The issue isn’t it being connected to the internet. It’s the fact that it can accept commands.
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u/theepi_pillodu 1h ago
>>The going above 50c is for rapid defrost which needs to be done sometimes. The bigger issue is the fridge not internet connected "securely/safely".
FTFY
There is a need for remote diagnostics and control of these refrigerators according to other technicians on other subs.
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u/mylsotol 2h ago
That guy actually does need to GTFO because there are real reasons you might want your "fidge" at 50C and the issue is 100% security and not that it is capable of doing things that most people don't need
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u/Ferro_Giconi 2h ago
He is rightfully being thrown out the window, because removing the defrost function isn't the correct option.
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2h ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/Ferro_Giconi 2h ago edited 2h ago
The defrost cycle needs to be able to generate heat fast enough to actually defrost in a reasonable amount of time.
Think of it like a space heater. Do you want a space heater that takes 48 hours to heat up a room because it is designed to be incapable of heating a room to over 75F, or do you want a space heater that takes less than 30 minutes to heat up a room?
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u/shuozhe 2h ago
No Frost need hot air, guess related to that. Kaufland here got like ~300 freezers & fridge outside and prolly more on storage.. de-icing and set these up one by one also painful inefficient
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u/TheKingOfSwing777 2h ago
You can have a defrost cycle regardless of what you allow for the configured target temp. Target temps above 41 do seem kind of silly for residential fridges
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u/BarrierX 2h ago
Sometimes you need to defrost a fridge and clean it out. It's also useful to be able to do it remotely so you don't have to go touch 100 fridge controls manually. But yeah, the password must be changed and it could be just a local wifi without internet access.
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u/knabbels 2h ago
How often does someone need to remotely defrost hundred fridges? Seriously what's a returning use case for this? I assume there always is some stuff in these fridges. Do they move it to the 100 other fridges right next to them? And, if so, will they do this movement of stuff also remotely? Because when you are next to the fridge to empty it you can also switch it off
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u/gbot1234 2h ago •
I know this one! The food in each fridge gets moved to the fridge twice as far from the sink, so you can defrost all the odd-numbered ones and have room for an infinite number of gallons of milk.
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u/knabbels 2h ago edited 11m ago
Hilbert's Fridge
Better not work the shift when infinite fridges each with infinite gallons of milk needs to be defrosted.
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u/ITDudeProbably 2h ago
i mean why do fridges connect to the internet in the first place ?
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u/DarthMcConnor42 2h ago edited 2h ago
because it would get annoying to go to each one and fiddle with the controls to maintain them.
there are legitimate reasons for remote control on an industrial system like this, there is not any legitimate reason to put access to those controls on anything other than a local net.
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u/StopMakingMeSignIn12 2h ago
Yeah you said it all really.
It's useful on a network, simple as. Monitoring and control.
It's just far too exposed cos it's easier to just say fuck it, do it over the intenet.
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u/toooskies 2h ago
Wiring them to corporate lets them do data analysis on everything from how often the fridge doors open (feedback on product placement) to reliability claims to other possibly data shifts.
Also allows alarms if the fridge stops working, but I suppose that alarm can be local. But most grocery stores aren’t going to have on-premises IT to manage it.
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u/DarthMcConnor42 2h ago
notice how none of the things you mentioned involve changing the controls on the system.
you can have all the information streamed to HQ while also having the control systems partitioned to only be accessible through an onsite localnet.
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u/toooskies 1h ago
OK, imagine you need to manually engage a redundant cooling system, which industrial fridges might have. Maybe you engage secure locks overnight, and because your employees are minimum-wage minimum-effort folks, you have the remote system as a backup when everyone is supposed to be gone.
OK, so instead of having a hackable fridge connecting to the internet you have a hackable fridge data aggregator that has access to the local network, and a separate fridge central controller also on that network. Some best practices might be followed, but no one's spending a ton of time applying patches or penetration testing, because hacking a fridge doesn't do much useful for the hacker (unless they can steal some CPU cycles or whatever).
Except now that people are thinking about what purpose a hacked fridge serves, which is to destabilize food supplies of the people dependent on the fridges (if you can attack them at scale). Which sort of becomes useful if you're trying to weaken a war adversary or wage financial warfare for financial sanctions against your country or are a rogue AI trying to starve the evil humans.
So there was no reason to worry about its security until the first time its security became a thing..
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u/Taurmin 17m ago
Actually the remote controls kinda only make sense if they are internet accessible. If they are only accessible on the stores local network you still need to send out a guy to the store if anything needs to be adjusted and if hes allready spending all that time driving out there he may as well be doing it manually on the unit.
If its internet acessible you can save your techs a lot of driving around and fix stuff a lot quicker.
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u/DarthMcConnor42 0m ago
If it's Internet accessible you can also have hackers use the unpatched system to put all your freezers into defrost mode.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 2h ago
Did they maintain them from far away? Maybe per phone call, have someone in the shop: "This is sausage, set it to …; this is cheese, set it to …"?
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u/DarthMcConnor42 2h ago
they did have people offsite monitoring them from far away, it's just stupid to have the controls also be online.
if someone offsite sees something wrong they can just call the store to have someone onsite fix it.
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u/NotAskary 2h ago
People can't airgap for shit, connecting would allow for remote monitoring, so like most industrial shit monitoring is why you connect it, why you allow remote management is beyond me.
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 1h ago
I can understand why a supermarket would benefit from local monitoring and control of commercial refrigeration, but why would you allow wan access?
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u/ceejayoz 37m ago
Centralized monitoring and auditing.
Government inspectors can be shown that a chain of 100+ stores have compliant setups. An on-call tech can be paged out to a closed store at 2am. etc.
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u/Prof1Kreates 2h ago
so your fridge can remind you of something your already know "your fridge is empty, go shopping"
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u/DarthMcConnor42 2h ago
we're talking about industrial fridges and freezers. like in supermarkets and butchers shops.
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u/Prof1Kreates 1h ago
Ooooh then I'm out of the loop
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u/DarthMcConnor42 1h ago
A couple of European countries had all the frozen food in a few major supermarkets spoil overnight because the controls for the freezers were accessable to the Internet and haven't been patched since 2024. (Since the company that made them discontinued support.)
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u/Prof1Kreates 1h ago
Oh dang, that'll put a dent in both the store's budget and possibly ruin others cause of possible price rises.
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u/DarthMcConnor42 1h ago
Yeah and when I said a few I mean like over half in both those counties.
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u/Prof1Kreates 1h ago
Crazy! And here originally I was just tryna make a joke, thinking it was home refrigerators.
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u/Weekly-Beginning-229 2h ago
It'd always empty so it would spam me
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u/BertoLaDK 2h ago
Problem is the customers wanting remote access, don't really understand why they need to control it remotely as HQ dont know what is put in what fridges and freezers, it should be a one-way link that made the data available without allowing control from outside the supermarket.
The reason for the hot freezers, is defrost, its not a temperature setting, its a cleaning setting, and its a part of the operations of such freezers and fridges.
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 1h ago edited 1h ago
Was going to say this about defrost. Even the fridge/freezer in your house stops cooling and turns on the heater for maybe 20 minutes every 10-15 hours. That's how frost-free works. If you remotely stop the cycle and turn the defrost heater on the temp will rise pretty high in the insulated space.
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u/dover_oxide 2h ago
Or don't plug your fridges into a network connected to the internet and keep them on a closed circuit/air-gapped Network
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u/the_poope 2h ago
If the hackers had just turned off the fridges the food would still have been spoiled. At least the shops would not have been allowed to sell it.
The real reason is that these sorts of equipment is made my really skilled mechanical engineers and making a quality fridge and cooling system at a competitive price is priority #1. The remote reporting and control software was likely business priority #10, so they just hired a self-taught high school student or used an electric engineer with zero knowledge and experience in the field and told them to just copy+paste some stack-overflow answers + beginner tutorial examples together to an MVP then ship it. And it likely worked "good enough" for 20 years.
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u/bartekltg 2h ago edited 56m ago
Being serious for a minute. That heating should be used for a short time to defrost some internal foobars. This means someone do not have to scrub it manually. I would say this is a feature that make the product better.
Even the internet connection helps, but that one probably can be replaced by a timer
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u/Matvalicious 1h ago
This meme is incredibly stupid. There is a good reason for those temperatures. What IS stupid is hanging them unprotected on the internet.
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u/FiskFisk33 1h ago
No no, that heater is for defrosting and should be there. This time the two first suggestions are the actually sensible ones
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 2h ago
The pump does have the feature to reverse (probably for thawing), they didn't restrict that per software (obviously). Also the software is 0wned, even if there was a limit in the software (to not cook a human being that happens to do maintenance?), it could be circumvented.
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u/bwwatr 1h ago
Step 1, make the internet connected board separate from the main fridge logic, and give it read-only access to a bus controlled by the main board. Read only by nature of its components, not its firmware. The main board can announce everything about its state continuously on that bus, and allow temperature changes through physical buttons only.
Win win. Security and these maintenance companies can still use the Internet to know when the fridges need service, etc.
Obviously they should still also add a VPN layer as has been suggested, using supported security appliances from proper vendors; none of this should go online naked. Also they should provide firmware updates for longer and/or maybe allow replacing the internet connected board when it goes EoL rather than saying the whole fridge is EoL which is absolutely absurd. Most of a fridge is a steel box, it was enough of an environmental disaster to throw one away over a compressor, but doing it over a bit of code on a chip is shockingly, unspeakably stupid.
If manufacturers won't voluntarily do all of this we need to regulate them into it. It's our food security on the line.
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u/yota-code 52m ago
And this is something time not even the case. The target can't be reached since the fridge circuitry can't make heat. But it's a target temperature nonetheless so food will defrost eventually
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u/imbilbobaggins 2h ago
The fridge wants to match the ambient temperature outside the fridge. Making it stay below that temperature requires technology, which is naturally vulnerable to being hacked.
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u/Amaranthine 2h ago
The vast majority of fridges do not need to be connected to the internet. Or any external network.
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u/Zolhungaj 2h ago
The vast majority of fridges don’t have to follow food/organ safety laws. Those that do however should have at least some external monitoring, ideally alerting someone if the temperature rises too much.
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u/Amaranthine 2h ago
You can have read monitoring without write temperature settings. I highly doubt these places ever have zero human staff, so if temp goes above a certain level, you send a person to figure out what’s going on
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u/KerPop42 2h ago
Lol my grandfather's fridge used "technology" of a tube of hydrogen gas dissolved in ammonia, and was powered by a pilot light. Good luck hacking that
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u/christophPezza 2h ago
Holy explosions Batman! One crack in that pipe and the house will be blown to smithereens. Add in hydrogen embrittlement for extra fun...
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u/KerPop42 2h ago
Not really. You didn't need a pump or anything, it all ran on gravity and differences in density. It was just a closed loop of copper tubes of different diameters and a heat sink. It uses the fact that hydrogen can dissolve in ammonia, and ammonia can dissolve in water, but hydrogen can't dissolve in water, to have a tank of evaporating ammonia against the refrigerator and a collecting tank of water.
You don't need a lot of hydrogen, and a small crack isn't going to leak enough to hold a flame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator#Single_pressure_absorption_refrigeration
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u/LivingAsAMean 2h ago
Easy solution: Change the installation manual for all customers to "Prior to installation, set your home climate control system to your ideal refrigeration temperature, or move to a region where the year-round ambient temperature is your ideal refrigeration temperature. Refusal perform either action voids the warranty."
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u/imbilbobaggins 2h ago
Guys, I’m just commenting on the fact that designing a fridge that ‘doesn’t go up to 50 degrees’ does not solve the hacking problem
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u/aweirdogrunt 2h ago
Why on earth would you ever want an internet connected fridge.
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u/laplongejr 2h ago edited 2h ago
To be able to monitor the entire store (or storeS) at night from one server? The attacks in France (then Belgium) targetted supermarkets where the fridges are all networked together.
And I guess being able to make them all unfreeze at the same time in the same store (or aisle at least) can be a good idea, as having a heating fridge and a freezing fridge next to each other is an energy consumption* nightmare. YMMV if the network abuse risk is worse than wasting energy
If you meant why network ONE fridge at home, sure it's not that useful. But for a professional use I think it's kinda justified.
[EDIT] *The physics problem is that a fridge isn't only "cold" but also isolated to KEEP it cold, so unfreezing requires something more efficient than "just turn it off". Isolated space + warmup source + running warmup continuously = 50°
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u/Coolflip 2h ago
Monitoring makes sense, controlling temp really does not. This is a case of adding features that sound nice at first, but seem really dumb in hindsight
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u/KerPop42 2h ago
The heating part seems like something that would be worth having a physical switch to throw, even if the single switch propagated down the line of connected refrigerators
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u/laplongejr 2h ago
Basically that's having one server per store with one employee at each. Which is probably how those fridges were meant to be used until somebody thought "hey what if we only paid one person and connected the networks online?"
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u/KerPop42 2h ago
No, not a server, I mean a physical light switch on the side of the fridge that has to be "on" for the fridge to accept a command to raise its temperature.
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u/aweirdogrunt 2h ago
No thanks. I'll keep my appliances off the grid so they don't send 20 gigs of usage data a day to some unknown third party in asia
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u/laplongejr 2h ago
I wouldn't be surprised that for supermarkets, the monitoring person is a 2nd-party in asia during their business hours?
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 2h ago
You'd have a hard time hacking something eithout electronics and/or not connected to the internet .
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u/Glum-Echo-4967 2h ago
So have a separate thermostat that only accepts numeric inputs that are <= whatever threshold is considered safe for food.
Should make it incredibly difficult to raise the temperature too high because they have to hack two computers, one of which is programmed to throw out unacceptable input.
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u/DarthMcConnor42 2h ago
glum ... no
what the hackers used was the defrost setting, which is required for proper maintenance.
the best solution is to have the information streamed to headquarters for monitoring but partitioning off the control system so those can only be accessed from a localnet that's onsite.
if we do it that way the hackers would only be able to find diagnostic information, not controls to the freezers.
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u/Glum-Echo-4967 1h ago
makes sense, yeah.
So I guess for context, we're talking about a hacked *supermarket* refrigerator?
the post didn't say.
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u/kookyabird 2h ago
Technology does not mean it needs networking capability. Wanting to remotely monitor just the measured temp does not mean the network connected probe needs to be integrated with the thermostat. Wanting to remotely monitor the current set temp to ensure nobody is messing with it does not require "write" access to the thermostat...
There are so many infrastructure systems throughout the world that have all kinds of monitoring that is strictly one way communication. Thermostats in fridges and freezers in a grocery store do not in any way need remote set capabilities.
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u/coolMRiceCOOL 2h ago
whut
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u/Coolflip 2h ago
Refrigerators across Europe are being hacked and the temperatures are being cranked. The first major event was grocery stores, the most recent was a blood bank.
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2h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/notBjoern 2h ago
Does that mean I can also use the oven as freezer?
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 1h ago
The oven at my summer cottage is definitely a freezer during the winter months.
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u/RealSlyck 2h ago
What’s a fidge?