2024-01-15 13:16:00
Household appliances are also becoming “smarter,” meaning that they are connected in one way or another. Some functions make sense, but one owner of an LG washing machine wondered why it was transferring gigabytes of data every day.
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“Smart” doesn’t always make sense
There are a lot of “smart” electronics these days that can be accessed via the Internet. This includes being able to control your heating remotely and turn it off if you forget to do so before your vacation, for example. Cases like this happen all the time, but sometimes some features can simply be described as bells and whistles.
In any case, a tweet from an LG user has currently caused astonishment (via Tom’s Hardware). He reported that his washing machine had an incredible hunger for data: The device loaded more than three gigabytes of data onto the network every day. The download, however, was relatively modest, as the device “only” received 100 megabytes from the internet.
The thread by the user named Johnie was and is mostly funny; for example, he jokes regarding DLCs (Downloadable Laundry Cycles) and speculates whether his washing machine is used as an LPU (Laundry Processing Unit) for crypto mining. The latter is not entirely unreasonable, by the way, as LG’s smart home devices have a history of being vulnerable to similar hacks. A washing machine botnet is unlikely, but not completely ruled out.
Johnie took his washing machine off the grid, but the explanation might be relatively trivial, at least some users suspect. The machine may not have uploaded such large amounts of data, but rather the user’s router recorded or specified it incorrectly. Because other users have checked their own smart LG washing machines and found that one megabyte is usually transferred per day – so practically nothing. However, the matter has not yet been completely clarified.
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