alt Hacker NewsThis still shouldn't be online. They can be networked, if you need remote monitoring, but that's different from being online (at least in my definition).
Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.
> This still shouldn't be online.
This line suggests the units themselves were targeted individually with a hack:
> Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified.
But the problem with networked devices spread across tens of thousands of pretty much unguarded locations, surrounded by unvetted employees, but taking orders form a central location is that there is no such thing as "not online". They'll talk to the management server used to set up the nightly defrost schedules across the fleet. Even if they are in an isolated VLAN, it's always one step away from someone connecting a Pi to that network and off they go online. There's only so much zero-trust, NAC/802.1x and segmentation can do when some devices will be too old to support these and their network will be the entry point to the management server, then to the whole fleet.
I'm honestly very surprised that a couple of things things haven't happened yet: the central server for managing these fleets getting hacked and allowing access to the entire fleet, and/or the companies realizing that the only way to limit the reach of an attack is to physically not have the hardware needed to do remote control.