Sounds like a generic botnet along with TVs, app based home cameras, routers and such.
Anyways, I remember some old story I’ve read, not idea if true or not, but someone was going over .sh files of a past employer and one of them telneted into a coffee machine (that reportedly nobody else knew had telnet) and made it brew coffee in just the right timing for the person to walk there and put a cup in the machine for coffee to start pouring right away. I guess that’s one actually good use for a “smart coffee machine”… Or they could wait. Unless they are paid hourly and the coffee break isn’t included, somehow.
A more legit use case is checking status. Is the coffee ready?
While I really don’t want to compliment Samsung, my “smart” range has a config to disable/enable remote operation. I can see when it’s on, what temp it is, when the oven is up to cooking temperature and when the timer goes off, I get notifications but assuming no holes or bugs it cannot be controlled remotely.
You might ask why they would ever allow “enable” but that’s a different question. They probably feel they have to because the “smart” feature costs way too much money for notifications and statuses.
The problem is there are easy and well understood ways to prevent that are easier and cheaper, yet manufacturers decide not to use that.
We have several local-only network protocols for exactly this. For residential use, notably Zigbee, z-wave, or Thread, and all of them have much cheaper radios than WiFi. The key benefit here is local only, no direct internet connection.
The only problem is you need a hub and historically not everyone is ready to set one up. However now that Apple, Amazon,and Google are building them into their devices, tens (hundreds?) of millions of people are already set on that
Sounds like a generic botnet along with TVs, app based home cameras, routers and such.
Anyways, I remember some old story I’ve read, not idea if true or not, but someone was going over .sh files of a past employer and one of them telneted into a coffee machine (that reportedly nobody else knew had telnet) and made it brew coffee in just the right timing for the person to walk there and put a cup in the machine for coffee to start pouring right away. I guess that’s one actually good use for a “smart coffee machine”… Or they could wait. Unless they are paid hourly and the coffee break isn’t included, somehow.
Telnet lacks auth. It needs ssh.
Tell that to the person from the random story who left some random company, and maybe whoever designed the machine
A more legit use case is checking status. Is the coffee ready?
While I really don’t want to compliment Samsung, my “smart” range has a config to disable/enable remote operation. I can see when it’s on, what temp it is, when the oven is up to cooking temperature and when the timer goes off, I get notifications but assuming no holes or bugs it cannot be controlled remotely.
You might ask why they would ever allow “enable” but that’s a different question. They probably feel they have to because the “smart” feature costs way too much money for notifications and statuses.
Isn’t that the story of the first webcam?
Plus there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol
Yup.
xcoffee, it is called, as in coffee for X11Well, that’s the problem with IoT devices, isn’t it.
The problem is there are easy and well understood ways to prevent that are easier and cheaper, yet manufacturers decide not to use that.
We have several local-only network protocols for exactly this. For residential use, notably Zigbee, z-wave, or Thread, and all of them have much cheaper radios than WiFi. The key benefit here is local only, no direct internet connection.
The only problem is you need a hub and historically not everyone is ready to set one up. However now that Apple, Amazon,and Google are building them into their devices, tens (hundreds?) of millions of people are already set on that