people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
people who like saving money decided to do this. For simple monitoring purposes. When you have thousands of fridges you want to know how their doing and you don't want to sent a person to inspect each one of them.
You could connect to an on-premise server. As a bonus, the manufacturer cannot disable them and extort money in this case.
They most likely are. Third party techs then access them over Citrix or VPN/RDP. There could be some cloud portion that aggregates data or pushes policies and schedules as well.
If the only usecase is monitoring, then why make the fridges anything else but report-only?
No firmware updates. no admin configuration. no ssh backdoors. just a transmit-only system
because the report code might have bugs
If it were transmit only, you could put it behind a data diode and buggy report code wouldn't matter. Even better, validating the code is a lot easier if it doesn't accept attacker input.
Monitoring requires one-way announcements, not bi-directional connections