Illustrative scenario
A refrigerated warehouse holds a full load of vaccines, or frozen food, or fresh produce headed to a few hundred stores. The product inside is only good as long as the temperature stays right. A few hours out of range can turn a truckload of value into a truckload of waste.
Now picture the sensors that report that temperature going quiet.
Maybe someone tampered with them. Maybe a well-meaning fix cut them off from the monitoring system. Either way, the screen in the control room still shows the last good reading. Everything looks fine. It isn't.
Cold storage is already a target. In April 2023, Americold, a major operator of temperature-controlled warehouses, found a cyberattack on its network and took operations offline to secure its systems.8 Nothing public says its cooling failed. But it shows that the buildings keeping food and medicine cold are on attackers' lists too.
Nothing shows the big idea of this book better than the cold chain. In most of security, closing the door is the finish line. In a cold chain, it's only half the job.
Say Findavi spots something wrong with a refrigeration controller and, with your approval, cuts it off from everything it shouldn't be talking to. The attacker is out. Good. But the next question matters just as much. Is the controller still holding temperature? Are the sensors still reporting to the monitoring system? Will the alarm still sound if something drifts?
If the answer to any of those is no, you've traded one problem for another, and this one melts.
That's why Findavi checks each action twice: one for security and one for service. The path is closed, and the cooling, the monitoring, and the alarms all still work. Both have to pass before the job counts as done.
If we can’t show the controller is still holding temperature, or that the monitoring system is still getting its data, the issue stays open. Cutting off the attacker is not the finish line.
The same goes beyond refrigeration. A pharmaceutical distributor, a food wholesaler, a biotech freezer farm. Anywhere the product depends on a controlled environment, the devices running that environment deserve the same attention as the computers in the office. Usually more.
Questions for your team
If the temperature sensors in your cold storage stopped reporting, how long before someone noticed? Do your security and facilities teams agree on who gets that call?