Oct 13, 2026, 12:48 AMReading about the refrigerator hack and it mostly being a case of putting devices directly on the internet - when I am an industrial magnate, and a captain of industry, I will instruct our engineers to put a simple check into the code, and refuse to bring up network interfaces with IPs that are globally routable, whether that's non-ULA IPv6, or a non-private IPv4 address
Oct 13, 2026, 12:49 AMBut the true genius in this plan is that we'll also have the pro model firmware that permits it, and we'll charge more for it.
And clearly, there are entire market segments that would line up to do that exact thing.
Oct 13, 2026, 12:53 AM(addendum: we will also refuse inbound connections from non-private IPs..it occurs to me that maybe these devices are being put into a DMZ on cheapo routers at the branch locations? Because it actually seems, overall, like a lot more work to get additional public IPs for crap when you also likely need IPs for other stuff like POS gear in retail, VPN to the head office, etc)
I get that it's _just a fridge_, and there's probably a lot of vendor "just gets it done" while the corporation that owns the stores has no idea, or maybe there's one internal person who raised any questions before being told that wasn't their lane.
But like... How do you connect thousands of fridges to the Internet and not have some semblance of a plan to reduce their attack surface?
(Also now seeing something about them all having the same default admin user and password?)
Oct 13, 2026, 1:10 AM@IrrationalMethod Well like that's the whole piece of the story I don't understand - exactly how many external IPs are these places getting for their individual retail location network drops? There's hundreds, if not thousands, of IP enabled devices in a decent sized grocery store (think every cash register, every POS terminal, every office computer, price scanner guns, printers, security, etc, etc.) - how does specifically the refrigerators end up raw on the internet?
And how much money are all those external ipv4 addresses worth?!
