alt Hacker NewsYou're right, a commercial freezer is a different beast than a household one. But what good does it really do anyone to be able to adjust that defrost schedule remotely? Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
Within a store certain freezers get more traffic than others, depending on how they're stocked, where they're located, etc, and therefore likely require more frequent defrosting. But that's something the store managers can figure out. It doesn't need to be managed remotely by some third party. So why did someone engineer that capability?
More features, generally, means more failure modes. More ways to exploit the system. Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion. It's very unhealthy and disordered behavior from an engineering standpoint--sacrificing reliability and simplicity for... what exactly? Some centralized control capability? But why?
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> something the store managers can figure out
That's like saying the store manager should manage the store website and networks instead of the chain's IT department.
No grocery store manager is going to be a licensed refrigeration technician. Ask them if they know about basic refrigeration concepts like superheat and subcooling, high side and low side pressures, compressor oils...
Further, a grocery store wants to optimize efficiency down to the percent, because that will save tens of millions of dollars over the fleet, and CO2 emissions. A store manager hardly has the capability.
To be clear I don't think the defrost schedule is the way the hackers enabled this or else every device would be affected. The older devices probably connect to the SaaS server in an insecure way and could be exploited en-masse.
> Surely the personnel on site are the ones best equipped to schedule the defrost cycles of their equipment?
The purpose of the automation is the same as always, to run at peak effectiveness and reduce human error. Most of the workers in this industry much like the fast food one, are low paid, low skill, receiving only basic training, with a high turnover rate, across tens of thousands of locations from major cities to somewhere in the sticks. Even a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage that's only obvious too late. So this extra work is taken out of their hands. You should really see a lot of the machines the big fast food chains use, you'd be amazed.
This kind of decision was never left to the store manager. In the past they'd get a printout and probably fail to follow the instructions occasionally, which may or may not cause damage or increases operating costs across the entire fleet. Now it's done over the network like everything else, for better or worse.
> Adding fringe features that aren't actually necessary (or desired) has become a strange industrial compulsion.
> More features, generally, means more failure modes.
Here's the kicker, they are necessary and desired by the customer and the failure scenarios were almost definitely factored into their calculations. I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.
And normally I'd agree (more) with you but the small scale of the hack makes me think they've done a decent job at securing them so far. Spending more on people and security to avoid any hack (right?), or losing efficiency over tens of thousands of locations costs more than the spoiled food.