A smart coffee machine generated 1 TB of traffic in 10 days and choked the Wi-Fi
A small story, but worth a thought for anyone who manages their own home network. According to GenK, an X user called @NomadsGalaxy was checking the Wi-Fi for his parents and found that a Keurig coffee machine had generated about 1 TB of uploads and nearly 10 GB of downloads in just 10 days.
He noticed it while looking at the UniFi network system at his parents' home. The unusual volume overloaded one Wi-Fi access point. Instead of investigating the cause, he unplugged the machine and bought his parents a different product. According to the article, most of the traffic seemed to stay inside the local network rather than going out to the Internet, so there is no evidence yet that the machine sent the family's data to outside servers. The most likely cause is a software bug or a communication fault on the network, and a restart may have fixed it.
The article also points to the bigger picture of the smart home: the more networked devices you have, the greater the chance of faults, security holes or service outages. IoT devices can become an entry point for attacks if the manufacturer does not update their software regularly, and some products lose most of their features when the company shuts down its servers.
For me, the practical lesson is to have a tool that shows traffic per device on the home network, and to consider putting IoT devices on a separate network. Without numbers, it is very hard to notice what a coffee machine is doing.
Source: GenK
He noticed it while looking at the UniFi network system at his parents' home. The unusual volume overloaded one Wi-Fi access point. Instead of investigating the cause, he unplugged the machine and bought his parents a different product. According to the article, most of the traffic seemed to stay inside the local network rather than going out to the Internet, so there is no evidence yet that the machine sent the family's data to outside servers. The most likely cause is a software bug or a communication fault on the network, and a restart may have fixed it.
The article also points to the bigger picture of the smart home: the more networked devices you have, the greater the chance of faults, security holes or service outages. IoT devices can become an entry point for attacks if the manufacturer does not update their software regularly, and some products lose most of their features when the company shuts down its servers.
For me, the practical lesson is to have a tool that shows traffic per device on the home network, and to consider putting IoT devices on a separate network. Without numbers, it is very hard to notice what a coffee machine is doing.
Source: GenK
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