Brainstorming here; monitoring, logging, etc. The fact the store managers were called out of bed when there was an issue indicates it works. If a cooler broke down overnight or its temperature was too high for X amount of time, they have to discard the products. Without monitoring they likely wouldn't know until customers got sick.
I wish commenters (in general) would do a bit more "steelmanning" before asking questions about why something is (in this case) connected to the internet.
All of this can be done without connecting edge devices directly to the internet (and potentially allowing inbound connections). The question is not why they have networking, but why the connectivity is such that an attack like this is even possible.
given they turned off the refrigerators (instead of something evil like turning them down for just long enough to allow bacterial growth and then turning them back up) customers would probably have noticed their ice cream being liquid, the frozen meat not being frozen, etc
>I wish commenters (in general) would do a bit more "steelmanning" before asking questions about why something is (in this case) connected to the internet.
People won't steelman because the answer to "why are the fridges slapdashedly networked?" is too often "because people of my ideological bent and demographics if not literally me previously demanded paper trails, audit-ability and regulatory compliance that was impossible for a low margin industry to pull off any other way."
loading story #50336919