LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

3.7GB seems like a lot, but modern appliances are highly efficient, a lot of those bits just circulate between the laundry and the router to cool down between wash cycles ... people just don&#x27;t understand how much data they use when hand washing clothes, sloshing gigabytes down the drain...<p>(after <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;meekaale&#x2F;status&#x2F;1744807035454079079" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;meekaale&#x2F;status&#x2F;1744807035454079079</a> )

If these devices are designed to upload &quot;automatic diagnostic reports&quot; to a central tracker, it&#x27;s possible this machine is stuck in a failure state that is generating massive amounts of error logs.

I have a LG washing machine and LG dryer that are wifi connected. I keep 90 days of netflow data. Both have used about 10mb total over the last 90 days, 100% on port 8883 tcp back to AWS EC2 owned IP addresses. Typically less than 100kb&#x2F;day with a high of 2mb&#x2F;day and a low of 12kb&#x2F;day.<p>Looking at the calendar, this corresponds to days we ran loads vs idle no use days. I&#x27;m okay with this level of data usage.

&gt; In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.

Why hasn&#x27;t anyone mentioned a botnet yet? Those devices are perfect targets for Mirai clones.<p>(yes, you still cannot run a mailserver at home, currently because we live in the age of Internet of Shit).

While I get the appeal of having networked devices that you can access from anywhere, I want local control for everything. Sure, a cloud option on top is nice, but local first!<p>I feel that the current solution to &quot;control from anywhere&quot; is the laziest and most privacy invasive. Also, when XYZ company shuts down there service in 2 years and abandons your product, you might not even be able to use it anymore. What a waste.

[dupe]<p>More discussion here with even the person who reported it posting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38930507">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38930507</a>

For those who do not want WiFi on their appliances you still can get highly rated reasonably priced washing machines without WiFi, even from the companies that are putting WiFi in nearly everything.<p>E.g., I recently bought an LG WM3400CW washing machine for $650. On Consumer Reports it is tied for 3rd on the front loader ratings list. The LG 3900 and 4000 are tied for #1 with overall scores of 87, then the 3400, 8900, and 3600 tied for #3 with overall scores of 85.<p>Nearly every LG has WiFi nowadays, but not the 3400. Consumer Reports says it does but I think they probably got confused because it has LG&#x27;s &quot;Smart Diagnosis&quot; which lets you get diagnostic information via LG&#x27;s mobile app.<p>On models with WiFi Smart Diagnosis does indeed use WiFi.<p>On models without WiFi it uses sound. The washing machine plays sounds that sound similar to the sounds that acoustic modems made back in the pre-broadband internet days. Their mobile app listens to those and extracts the diagnostics data.

Trash SEO article. You have to sleuth through a page of info and ads to glean a paragraph of inconclusive content. Looking at you, Google.

&gt; An LG washing machine owner and <i>self-confessed fintech geek</i> has asked the Twitterverse why his smart home appliance ate an average of 3.66GB of data daily.<p>What about non-techies?! How would they notice and react to such data harvesting behaviors in their homes&#x27; appliances, computers, phones, gadgets? I believe there must be a bare minimum of self-awareness to deal with the ever-evolving digital world we live in.

LG washing machines are the bane of my existence today because we have a power outage that will last for quite a while, clothes inside the washer, in water, and a locked lid. So far I haven&#x27;t any way to open the damn thing without taking a hammer to it.

PSA:<p>If you buy any hardware that requires an internet connection to work return it as faulty.<p>Is this washer going to get software updates for it&#x27;s entirely lifespan?<p>&quot;It&#x27;s behind NAT and a firewall&quot;.<p>Well if one of your other devices get infected and it gets infected now what?<p>&quot;But NAT&quot; you heard of STUN servers? It doesn&#x27;t need to be in a botnet to be malicious... That&#x27;s assuming your ISP router from 10 years ago without any updates isn&#x27;t also vulnerable.<p>&quot;But I keep an eye on my stuff&quot; what about the 5billion other users in the world?<p>IOT is insecure garbage you shouldn&#x27;t be putting in your house and you shouldn&#x27;t let your family do so either.

A couple of notes:<p>1. If you must have an IoT device, favor zigbee.<p>2. Put your IoT devices on a segmented network that you&#x27;ve throttled. IoT devices neither need nor deserve privileged network access.<p>3. Probably don&#x27;t use a consumer grade router if you know how to monitor network traffic.<p>4. That all being said, it feels unlikely that an IoT device would be exposed on a properly configured router to anything beyond vendor spyware.

I created a wifi network for most of the smart appliances at home. It&#x27;s nice that Unifi hardware lets you choose some of the higher-level wifi protocol options per-network, so I have a modern roaming-enabled 802.11 5GHz network for most devices, and the legacy 2.4GHz one for the fridge and stove to make use of.

It&#x27;s the Russians.<p>They&#x27;ve run out of their own washing-machine chips to re-use in their missiles, so they&#x27;ve found a way to hack into washing-machines all over the world and use those millions of chips to guide their missiles instead.

I had a similar scare with an Amazon smart plug. Later the heavy user was another device. Turns out AsusWRT &#x2F; asusMerlin has a pretty severe accounting bug . My router was running the same software as this author

New: data-efficient washing machine. Only 90Gb per load!! Buy now!

If I&#x27;m being charitable, I assume most of these IoT devices that could just use local-only networking for basic functionality do it through a central (Internet) server for &#x27;security&#x27;.<p>If the device just opened a simple TCP&#x2F;HTTP server on your network for phone app access, there would be dozens of breathless articles from the typical low-quality technology sites claiming that your washing machine can easily be monitored by hackers. By hitting a specific LG domain and verifying&#x2F;pinning certs, the vendor can ostensibly secure that central API and easily make updates if issues are found.<p>It sure seems like it would be much cheaper to have the device simply connect to Wifi and be able to respond to simple TCP packets (TP-LINK smart switches do this) rather than build all this centralized infrastructure that costs money in perpetuity.

According to UniFi, my LG washer and dryer have each used 15.9MB in the last month. LG Dishwasher used 3.8MB. I keep all IOT devices like these on client-isolated WiFi on their own VLAN with a speed limit of 250Kbps. They don’t have access to all the bandwidth they can eat, so they can’t participate meaningfully in a DDOS attack when compromised. 250Kbps is enough for “laundry is done” and “grill is pre-heated” push notifications to squeak through.

For those who want to IoT-ify their washing machine, I&#x27;ve had great success with a power meter like a TP-Link HS110.<p>It&#x27;s connected to a power strip with a switch so that it can be turned off when not in use (which BTW would also be a solution for the owner of the LG machine).<p>Due to the ability to read it out with Python it sends me an Email when the washing is done and I can also track the power consumption in Grafana. It also shows a &quot;finished X minutes ago&quot; message on some HA-like always-on tablet dashboard.

When cryptocurrency tumbling gets literal...<p>Edit to add: I also just realized I have an LG that does have wifi that I&#x27;ve never used, which may now get used for entirely different reasons...<p>I buy asus having a math bug or something, it is also possible those are constant retries on something failing. I put a pihole on my parents home network and in a month their roku had some stupid amount of blocked attempts, in the tens of thousands.

Is anyone else surprised at the ~70GB per day usage (assuming 3.7GB is 5% of total usage)? That would exceed the 1.28TB data cap on my ISP.

If I&#x27;m hand washing the stuff, I&#x27;m probably posting 6 gb an hour on Instagram so this seems about right to me.

I have both an LG washer and dryer, about 2 years old I’m unable to connect the dryer to WiFi at all (UniFi). The washer does nothing useful on WiFi. All I want is them to connect to HomeAssistant or HomeKit and send a notification when they finish their cycle. I am super disappointed in LG.

My rule for these types of appliances is hook up long enough to get any firmware updates and then unplug and wait and see if the machine functions normally, then it is likely to never see my network again. I suppose they could still use 4g but I doubt most companies will do that.

I&#x27;m not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don&#x27;t know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.

I have an LG washer and dryer with wifi capability.<p>WHY THE FUCK DO I WANT THEM CONNECTED TO MY NETWORK

This should be illegal unless the data format is open, documented and user can turn it off or set their own endpoint or their preferred repairer.

The router was misreporting network activity. The machine wasn&#x27;t sending 3.7GB a day. It says so in the article.

Which OS are these machines running? Are we still doing RTOSes here or have we moved to a full Yocto linux image?

The software was replaced by an AI, and it&#x27;s watching YouTube videos on how to do it&#x27;s job.

Well it&#x27;s still better than a Chinese robotic vacuum cleaner with a bunch of cameras doing it.

Well, why guess. Check the outgoing destination of the traffic on the router.

If I recall correctly, his washer was mining Bitcoin.

It&#x27;s all Mime fellatio video?

That&#x27;s why we have bufferbloat.

Yet another reminder I need to segment off my network. Have a VLAN with just IoT junk and severely restrict access to the local network and internet.

I just wonder which of LG&#x27;s competitors ordered this nonsense.

Assuming I&#x27;d be stupid enough to have a &quot;smart&quot; washing machine, in this case I would&#x27;ve immediately started capturing packets to determine what&#x27;s going on. Apparently it was a misreporting(!) in the router&#x27;s firmware, but the opaqueness of modern technology (and the ignorance it tends to perpetuate) can be very infuriating.<p>Meanwhile my washing machine has zero electronics and is completely predictable and obvious in operation.

Title clickbait. Please remove article.

Stupid laundry machine spends all day on reddit downvoting my jokes and memes.