The revolt of the machines has begun. Smart washing machines secretly leak gigabytes of traffic onto the Internet every day (4 photos)

The owner of an LG smart washing machine with Internet connectivity discovered that this miracle of modern household appliances uploads almost 4 GB of traffic to the Internet every day.





What exactly the car shares with the world remains a mystery - the manufacturer ignored all requests, and he was unable to find out on his own. The digital “iron curtain” helped solve the problem - the machine was forcibly switched to offline mode.

Overly smart technology

Modern home electronics can live their own virtual life and go online with or without permission, without the owner’s permission. This was proven by an LG washing machine with a Wi-Fi module, the owner of which discovered that it sends almost 4 GB of information to the Internet every day.

This unusual behavior was encountered by a user of the social network X, also known as Twitter, under the pseudonym Johnie (@Johnie). He outlined the situation on his blog, and his post, published on January 9, 2024, instantly became popular. By the time the material was published, it had received more than 2 thousand comments, 4 thousand reposts, 55 thousand likes, and at least 3 thousand users added this post to their “Favorites.”

Whether it is worth putting home appliances on the Internet is an open question. Although now the answer has become a little more obvious

Johnie published screenshots according to which his Korean washing machine consumes around 3.66 GB of traffic per day. Of this, 96 MB is incoming traffic, and the remaining 3.57 GB is outgoing. The image shows a dip in traffic consumption - according to the owner, it coincides in time with the moment when the machine was performing its main function, that is, washing things.



Sometimes smart technology gets too smart

In other words, the LG machine uploads the bulk of traffic to the Network only when it is idle. By the time the material was published, the owner did not know what exactly she was doing on the Internet.

The truth is somewhere near

Johnie sent several requests to LG technical support in an attempt to find out the nature of the traffic generated by the washing machine, but did not receive a response. In the comments to his publication in X, users began to voice their assumptions, and the most common among them is that someone uses a washing machine to mine Bitcoin.

The second most popular guess is that the machine has become part of a botnet network and is used by attackers, including to carry out DDoS attacks.





You have to download washing modes manually

In the process of searching for the truth, Johnie discovered two facts, one more curious than the other. The first is that his washing machine by default does not support a number of washing modes that are familiar to many - they have to be downloaded additionally.

The second fact is that the software of LG's creation, which washes clothes Johnie, does not know how to reset the wireless Internet connection settings. You just need to save the name of the Wi-Fi network and its password in the machine’s memory once, and they will remain there forever. The only available options are the ability to connect to another wireless network.

A simple and ingenious solution

Having still not figured out the true reason for his washing machine’s insatiable appetite for traffic consumption and having failed to reset its Wi-Fi settings, Johnie solved the problem once and for all. He didn't change the name of his wireless network; instead, he simply blocked the machine's Internet access.



No internet - no problem

This action instantly brought the desired result - the washing machine stopped uploading huge amounts of information to the Internet for such a device. Johnie confirmed this with a screenshot.

Apparently, Johnie himself is inclined to believe that his washing machine, which has its own processor and has, albeit insignificant, but still computing power, was used by someone to mine cryptocurrency. After blocking her internet access, he wrote: “The data usage has stopped since I blocked the device on my router. Sorry if you used my washing machine to mine bitcoins."