Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/09/hacking-a-coffee-maker.html
As expected, IoT devices are filled with vulnerabilities:
As a thought experiment, Martin Hron, a researcher at security company Avast, reverse engineered one of the older coffee makers to see what kinds of hacks he could do with it. After just a week of effort, the unqualified answer was: quite a lot. Specifically, he could trigger the coffee maker to turn on the burner, dispense water, spin the bean grinder, and display a ransom message, all while beeping repeatedly. Oh, and by the way, the only way to stop the chaos was to unplug the power cord.
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In any event, Hron said the ransom attack is just the beginning of what an attacker could do. With more work, he believes, an attacker could program a coffee maker — and possibly other appliances made by Smarter — to attack the router, computers, or other devices connected to the same network. And the attacker could probably do it with no overt sign anything was amiss.
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