[HN Gopher] I hacked my washing machine
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I hacked my washing machine
Author : JadedBlueEyes
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-07-27 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nexy.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (nexy.blog)
| bblou wrote:
| I'm surprised you let your washing machine into your network. I
| now get the appeal of just an alert the washing machine is done.
| But I could not for the life of me allow any of these kinds of
| devices onto my home network. Even in isolation...
| stavros wrote:
| Why wouldn't you allow it in isolation?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| How isolated are we talking? A device that only has access to
| the internet can still get botnetted and send malicious
| traffic from your IP. Or burn your data cap, or spy on you
| for the vendor.
| stavros wrote:
| But the comment said "I wouldn't allow it on my local
| network", not "I wouldn't allow it on the Internet".
| aspenmayer wrote:
| LAN is being used in an under specified way. To my
| reading, a separate VLAN or standalone LAN for the
| washing machine wouldn't be on "my (main/primary LAN is
| assumed here) local network" if I mean that "my local
| network" doesn't have untrusted devices on it. I tend to
| read these kinds of comments with a bit of wiggle room
| because sometimes folks disagree about if VLANs are
| actually isolated enough to consider them separate local
| networks, as the same device may do routing and firewall
| or VLAN tagging, so there is isolation in principle, but
| bad actors can't be expected to comply with network
| security policies.
|
| I guess I can see how each of you could be right to their
| own reading.
| stavros wrote:
| I agree otherwise, but they said "even in isolation",
| which removes the ambiguity.
| wrboyce wrote:
| For untrusted IoT devices I've found that sticking them on
| the IoT VLAN (so no device-to-device communication, and
| either no or extremely limited internet access; but I let
| my trusted clients punch through to IoT devices) has
| allowed me to retain all functionality whilst being
| confident they're not up to anything I don't want or
| expect.
| neoden wrote:
| Why?
| doubleg72 wrote:
| It's fairly simple to keep these devices isolated and if you
| have a decent firewall, you shouldn't have much to worry about.
| Keeping them in a separate, internet-only VLAN with peer to
| peer isolation is typically the standard protocol. That said,
| in a lot of cases, even keeping the isolated doesn't resolve
| any privacy concerns. Also, with some devices, you have to open
| up mDNS.
| EspadaV9 wrote:
| My dryer doesn't have a delay function accessable via the front
| panel, it's been "app gated", and the only way the app can talk
| to it is via WiFi, so if I ever need to set a delay, I have to
| use the app. All IoT devices are on their own VLAN though, and
| where possible firewalled off too. I can easily imagine more
| features being locked behind the app for future models.
| j45 wrote:
| Creating an IoT wifi that is one way is reasonably possible.
|
| Someone shared this pdf written by someone that had a nice
| overview that is transferable to any router.
|
| https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti
| timedout_uk wrote:
| Hey, blog author here. It only had access to the internet for a
| brief second, and even then it was on an entirely separate
| network because of how I just set up my openwrt router as a
| client to the main network. Our guest network is completely
| isolated, an explicit firewall rule had to be added so that my
| script could communicate with the washer while it's on this
| network. It has no access to anything but itself, and
| occasionally hears the screams of my script demanding it serves
| up data.
|
| It has access to nothing, only my script has access to _it_ - I
| don 't see a risk here. I still have the heebie jeebies knowing
| it's connected to anything at all, or even the fact that it
| _can_ do that, but also spending a night hacking a washing
| machine was incredibly funny to me and totally worth it. Plus,
| got some useful notifications out of it.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Respect, but this is kinda the hard way - I just plugged mine
| (dumb machine, not smart) in via an energy metering plug, and
| when energy use drops to less than 10W for more than 2 minutes,
| it's done - very simple homeassistant automation. Convenient for
| me as the machine is 500m from the house.
| bombcar wrote:
| Now I want to know why your washing machine is half a kilometer
| from your house.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| Seriously, me too. I also want to know how they transport the
| laundry to/from the machine. I'm hoping for a conveyor belt
| of sorts.
| XorNot wrote:
| Yeah this is my approach too. Though I need to revisit the
| thresholding.
| qwertox wrote:
| I do the same,works great. I liked it so much that im doing the
| same with my microwave, after removing the annoying beeper it
| had. Now i get a decent single short beep and can monitor how
| often I've used it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Couldn't you just set a timer for 45 minutes, or whatever? Is
| there that much variance in load times?
| JadedBlueEyes wrote:
| Nex is a cybersecurity student in a house of similar people,
| they're gonna take _every_ way :3
|
| quote:
|
| > The plan is, in future, since we can't hack something that
| doesn't have a brain, to instead attach a brain to it. The
| dishwasher is easy, we can just whack that on a smart plug and
| monitor when the power use surges and drops. The dryer is a bit
| more difficult, since they pull a LOT of power, and smart plugs
| typically either don't support that much power, or are
| incredibly expensive. So that's likely going to be some fancy
| vibration sensor-based thingy
| dmd wrote:
| This is what I do - when the washer finishes, a light turns on
| in the kitchen letting us know. Then, when the dryer has drawn
| power for 10 seconds, the light turns back off, because that's
| a good indication that someone dealt with the wet laundry.
| (Sometimes things get out of sync but not often!)
| gausswho wrote:
| This is what Hacker News posts should be.
| bilinguliar wrote:
| I suggest pushing washing machine metrics to Prometheus, it just
| asks for it.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Practical engineer in me screams: SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY.
|
| Just plug the washing machine into a smartplug and alert when
| power draw drops to idle for more than X minutes.
| timedout_uk wrote:
| but where's the fun in that :P
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| True, we all find enjoyment in different things
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Our previous washing machine had a mechanical rotating switch,
| sort of like an egg timer, built into it. I seriously thought
| about just gluing a pair of metal bits onto it to make a
| physical connection when it was done, which would either do
| something clever like trigger a RasPi into sending me a text,
| or something stupid like physically triggering a doorbell
| chime.
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