An LG washing machine owner discovered that his smart home device was uploading an average of 3,66 GB of data to the internet every day.
"Worried about the washing machine's internet addiction, Johnie blocked the device using his router's UI," he says Tom's Hardware.
Initial screenshot of Johnie shows that on a selected day, the device uploaded 3,57 GB and downloaded about 100 MB. Data traffic was almost constant.
Meanwhile, according to the screenshot of the Asus router, the washing machine accounted for 5% of Johnie's daily Internet traffic.
The owner of the LG washing machine tried to make fun of his predicament by mentioning that the appliance can use Wi-Fi for “DLC (Downloadable Laundry Cycles).”
He wasn't entirely kidding: The machine downloads presets for various types of clothes. However, the data traffic that was transferred showed that the device was uploading.
Johnie also thought about the possibility of someone using his washing machine for crypto mining. "I would happily rent the LPU (Laundry Processing Unit) by the hour," he quipped.
Then again, there was a possibility that there was some truth behind this joke. There are hackers who take over smart devices to use their computer resources as part of a botnet. Controlling an LG washing machine as part of a large botnet for cryptocurrency mining or malicious networking purposes would not be as far-fetched a scenario as it sounds.
For now, an easy answer to the mystery of the data leak is to blame Asus for misreporting.
We may never know what happened to Johnie, who now operates his laundromat offline.
Another relatively innocent reason for the alleged high volume of downloads could be a bug in the Asus firmware. In a follow-up post a day after his original tweet, Johnie reported an “inaccuracy in the Asus router tool,” about Apple iMessage data usage.
Other LG smart washing machine users have indicated that their device's data usage typically uses less than 1MB per day.
