These are on the internet for things like cold chain auditing (consumer protection/health inspection stuff) and dynamic power grid balancing (as in, sun is shining extra hard today, so set all the grocery fridges a couple degrees lower temporarily to act as a solar battery). I.e., for good reasons that we like. Grocery fridges amount to something like 1% of all the energy used in any given country, so this isn’t nothing.

There haven’t been many details about these attacks other than the "password of the day" backdoor, and it’s reasonably likely that these were only visible on an intranet that was breached by hacking someone’s laptop or something.

The real problem is that they’re still using the firmware with the manufacturer backdoor. That’s crazy.