An Amazon Echo owner has taken to social media to complain about their smart speakers, saying that the hardware is using too much data even when it’s mostly unused. Dave W. Plummer, who helped develop the Windows Task Manager and ported Space Cadet Pinball to Windows, posted on X saying that his two Amazon Echo Show devices, which he said he “never” uses, exceeded 4 GB of data usage in 24 hours.
is this an Echo issue or are these people unwitting members of a botnet?
Disclaimer: Commenting before I’ve read the article.
I mean, it’s Dave Plummer. He’s pretty switched on.
If he has tinkered with it, he will know what he has done to it.
If they haven’t been tinkered with and have been adopted into a botnet, that’s a defective product and shit security from Amazon.More likely it’s doing what Amazon has made it do. So, probably audio recordings and any other sensor data and metrics they can gather
More likely it’s doing what Amazon has made it do. So, probably audio recordings and any other sensor data and metrics they can gather
I agree this is likely the culprit. Having read the article though, he seems “sure it’s not spying”.
Now that I’ve read it, my question stands.
The guy reporting the issue is a pretty well respected tech YouTuber who helped invent Microsoft Task Manager, so I feel like he’d know to check for that, but it was never explicitly mentioned.
Hopefully he figures it out and does a follow up, I’m curious now.
Based on some of the gray beards I know; doing something cool with technology 30+ years ago doesn’t necessarily translate to continued tech literacy.
Why not just record the packets originating from the amazon devices for a month or so to see what they’re doing? Should solve the mystery pretty quickly.
I’m guessing it would be a bunch of Https or tls packets to Amazon domains and IPs
Just break the encryption. Easy peasy.
Just hack the mainframe
