I can see reasons for why you would like to access them remotely. The bigger question in my mind is why are they connected to the internet so shittily?

When we place devices in customer networks we have the device open a VPN tunnel back to our concentrator node, and route our management traffic through it.

Then the customer firewall blocks anything incoming as usual, and all we need is the rules to allow outgoing VPN client traffic and established rules for the responses from the server.

I agree on the wifi thing, especially after the military ones got hacked and without explanation yet. So stupid!

Assuming it's impossible to disconnect them from wifi, why has nobody decided to hire people to act as "security" in the event they do start heating up? Even some workers externally from a security company on just on 1 month contract? These attacks happened in the night time, naturally, and it was too late by the time someone came in to open the store. Is it better to hire a security guard onsite for $25/hr for 1 month with fridge operating training, or pay $200,000 in damaged goods and have to close your stinky store down?

There's no good reason for temp control itself to be attached to the internet. The people who work on-site can handle that. There are always people on-site who stock the fridges and cleaning, etc., and the managers for those workers. These things aren't sitting alone in a building with no human oversight for miles around. Monitoring and logging can be centralized while air-gapping the actual control of the temp.

I have no doubt that's exactly what they're working on right now.

TBF: They call home when a unit needs maintenance; they can turn the temperatures up a little when the store is closed early or opens late. There's likely some ecological upside.

That said, a complete ruin of all the frozen goods probably wipes out years of cost-saving and eco-savings.

Having worked in automation, OTSec adoption is in its infancy. SSO? SSL? Shared passwords everywhere, mostly root or admin. Usually walled garden approach, and once you're in, those apples are ripe for picking.

I asked this question before and I will ask again... What advantages do internet connected fridges have over non-internet connected? Automatically ordering groceries? That is bullshit. I will order what I want when I want it. And I have always gone to the supermarket to do so that except a few times during quarantine.

Adjusting the temp based on what is in there? Firstly what is in my fridge is no one's business. I do not want my eating habits (or what I buy and forget to eat) to be known by some fridge company.

I cannot think of a reason to have a smart fridge. But I want to know what the reasoning is? More importantly, why it even needs a net connection.

They are connected so they can be controlled and serviced from a central location. These aren't consumer fridges. These businesses basically hire a servicing company and even lease the fridges from those companies. It's more cost efficient then having a guy in each store that basically does nothing all day to fix the occasional problem. And waiting for a repairman to physically come in so they can just reboot or just change some parameters is also not ideal. The problem isn't that they are connected the problem is that people don't take internet security seriously. Like recently some Danish government server got hacked and data from citizens got stolen because a government worker didn't change the default password of his account.

Because they were designed with cloud first mentality, they are fetching the temperature 100 times per second to the server. In case of connection issues, they stop working.

Does this seen stupid? Yes. Did I make it up? Also yes. Is the true for a lot of consumer electronics? Yes.

The only good reason I can think of for a fridge to be connected to the internet is to alert you to a compressor failure when it happens so you can get the food out of it.

Edit: I should have clarified that I meant consumer fridges, which I install for a living and so my brain defaulted to that. Commercial systems definitely need monitoring of some sort, and network access is the best way to centralize that.