Imagine if making your morning brew had the ability to torment you while also demanding a ransom in exchange for a swig of the bean juice that keeps us all going each day?
Martin Hron – who works for antivirus software maker Avast – picked apart a security weakness in an automatic coffee machine by reverse engineering it – and at the same time found a weakness in most IoT-connected devices. Watch the video to see his handy work in action.
Hron told Information Age it took him a week to turn the coffee machine into a ransomware machine.
They reported that:
When the user tried to connect the coffee machine to their home network, the machine would immediately turn on the burner, let loose hot water, continually spin the bean grinder and display a ransom message while beeping. The only way to make this whole mess stop would be to unplug the device, rendering it unusable.