So freezers connected to the internet?

Yeah, I saw a report about this earlier today. Someone hacked in to grocery store freezers in Sweden, France, and Belgium and set them to 50C, so lots of spoiled food.

Helpful tip for modern living: don't connect any critical systems to an external network.

Dave

21 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Yeah, I saw a report about this earlier today. Someone hacked in to grocery store freezers in Sweden, France, and Belgium and set them to 50C, so lots of spoiled food.

Helpful tip for modern living: don't connect any critical systems to an external network.

Dave

The lesson of Battlestar Galactica has not been learned 😉

Believe it or not, if you have a smart TV or Smart fridge, they are watching you! 👀 I have a neat little shutter
on my laptop that keeps the camera closed when not in use!

Welcome to 1984. James Orwell was a prophet. But his book didn't say much about mischievous technology. I could say more about his book but I'll just leave it.

Noel

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

Welcome to 1984. James Orwell was a prophet.

George Orwell. 😉

A senior's senior slip trusting his memory.

Noel

3 hours ago, birdguy said:

Welcome to 1984. James Orwell was a prophet. But his book didn't say much about mischievous technology.

In Orwell's book didn't they did have cameras at every streetcorner? I think that's pretty mischievous.

You don't have to be a senior to have memory slip. It has probably been 40 years since I read 1984.

12 hours ago, Mace said:

In Orwell's book didn't they did have cameras at every streetcorner? I think that's pretty mischievous.

You don't have to be a senior to have memory slip. It has probably been 40 years since I read 1984.

Cameras were everywhere, including inside people's residences. We are definitely there.

18 hours ago, birdguy said:

Welcome to 1984. James George Orwell was a prophet.

Always amazes me that he wrote the book in 1948 too, definitely a man ahead of his time.

Re: Freezers connected to the internet - the idea was to get alerts if a power outage or other failure caused the freezer to stop working, someone would get the alert and manually intervene. Its not necessarily a bad idea, but from reading into the situation, it seems the hackers gained access using the default passwords, which of course, should have been changed upon installation.

Though the luddite in me does agree, not everything needs to be connected to the internet lol

Keep in mind that while you are on your computer, mainly the newer ones, there's a camera staring back at you! My
older laptop had one that I put a piece of black tape across while I didn't need it. My newer one has a nice little
sliding shutter that blocks it! There are 👀 👀s everywhere! 😱

The alternative is to pay people to monitor the freezers on site. Oh, wait.......you mean they would actually have to give a job to someone? OMG, the horror!

My computer is almost as old as I am. No cameras Charlie. And I still do my writing on an old version of Word Perfect.

Noel

There's so many deeper issues at play here:

-Connecting anything to the internet whether it is needed or not. I could see needing to remotely monitor temperature, but make it read only so that it can't be hacked. It is bad design from the start.

-Apparently, at least for some, the username is admin, and the password is simply today's date. Some reports said that it couldn't even be changed. Again, bad design.

-There were updates available to fix this, of course they don't always get applied.

-This happened earlier (I think a month or two ago) and was all over the mainstream news, yet people still leave their systems vulnerabe.

Companies have been slashing IT staff and budgets for years, the IT job market is rough right now. Yet, you hear about countless hacks and other technical issues. Companies would rather cut costs and deal with the fallout rather than deal with preventable issues.

Tech companies design things to ship fast, and fix them later. Staying on top of updates is critial.

Hacking is only going to get worse with AI. AI can sit there and endlessly try things, search limitless amounts of information to find ways in. Companies are focusing on it less while the problem is getting exponentially worse.

20 hours ago, kerosene31 said:

Companies have been slashing IT staff and budgets for years, the IT job market is rough right now. Yet, you hear about countless hacks and other technical issues. Companies would rather cut costs and deal with the fallout rather than deal with preventable issues.

Tech companies design things to ship fast, and fix them later. Staying on top of updates is critial.

Hacking is only going to get worse with AI. AI can sit there and endlessly try things, search limitless amounts of information to find ways in. Companies are focusing on it less while the problem is getting exponentially worse.

Very true points - most businesses (mine included) see cyber security as an expense to be reduced, when the AI problem means these budgets should be increasing over time. Anything that impacts the bottom line that isn't directly contributing to growth gets slashed, health and safety is another big area that only costs money without generating any value for the company, so again, budgets get slashed. Human Resources and Customer Service budgets too - why do I need to support the customer after the fact when I already have their money from the initial purchase? Why would I need to support my current employees when I can just turn them over with replacements when they burn out, like changing a lightbulb or fuse?