It has to do with refrigerators reachable on the Internet.
If the refrigerators were not reachable on the Internet, none of this fragility would exist.
The fragility of refrigerators reachable on the Internet was demonstrated just a few weeks ago. These refrigerators were left connected to the Internet.
This lack of discernment and misunderstanding of risks and fragility will not be solved with a better router or a different uplink.
And it would be (mostly) fine if they were on the net, with read only access
I mean, what happens when a compressor or other physical part goes out? You can't fix that remotely anyways. You might still want remote monitoring for that kind of situation.
And most importantly, these fridges always have someone close by. Make it a physical button instead of a remote function
These refrigeration providers work with local contractors and HVAC companies to set things up. Their installation techs do what they think is required to remotely operate these systems. If you bring up the question keeping these systems offline or at least on airgapped networks you will most likely get a shrug as reply.
This is not a technology problem. This is problem of responsibility. One can hope things will improve when litigation starts happening, but it doesn't look good considering these people had literally months of notice since the well-publicized attacks on the American fridges, then the French fridges, and now these.
Litigation does of course occur but it's not the main mechanism.
Do you folks coordinate in the way described, and show success with it? (Would most people agree with you?)
1. many countries have higher regulatory burden than the US
2. that does not mean regulatory gaps don't exist
The person above was simply pointing out that litigation is not the only way to solve a problem. Which is plainly true, you can simply require compliance via other legal means. For example, a government could create a regulatory standard for security and require vendors to follow it. Whereas in the US the political appetite is to be more hands-off and allow people make vulnerable products if the market allows.
Why would there be accidental port mappings on their router though? I could maybe see owners setting it up so they could monitor from home, but even that is a bit of a stretch for rural supermarket owners
That's the point of NAT-PMP / UPnP, it just works (for game servers, torrent clients, industrial control systems etc.)
someone manually poking a hole in their firewall is way more likely