Coffee maker generates more than 1TB of traffic in 10 days

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... In 10 days and 9 hours, a coffee maker sent 1,008 gigabytes of data. A viral post on X demonstrates an ordinary appliance causing network issues.

Exceptionally high network activity was detected from the Keurig K-Supreme SMART coffee maker.

"Hey uh, Keurig " what the hell is a COFFEE MACHINE uploading, let me double check ... ONE F***ING TERABYTE OF DATA IN 10 DAYS!?!?" A tweet exploded on X, with nearly 2 million views in hours.

The shocked owner, who goes by the alias Nomad, said he will unplug the device immediately and will get his parents a new coffee machine.

The included screenshot from a network monitoring app shows the appliance downloading 9.94GB and uploading 1,008.45 GB of data in just over 10 days.

Nomad later explained that the device belongs to his parents and he simply helps to manage their network. He discovered the suspicious activity while checking the statistics through Ubiquiti's UniFi networking system.

The excessive traffic became an instant joke on X, with commenters blaming the coffee maker for crypto mining, peddling adult content, and seeding torrents. Some users feared that the device might be spying or had been hacked.

Nomad said that most of the suspicious traffic didn't escape the network. He has a hypothesis that the unit was simply affected by a bug. Nomad said he has over 10 years of experience in IT and works as a Technical Field and Community Specialist at the 3D printer manufacturer Prusa.

"This is a problem that saturated an access point (AP) and could have taken down the network if I didn't have other APs to share the load. It needs to be fixed," Nomad added.

After rebooting the device and reconnecting it to a segregated virtual LAN (VLAN), the issue did not reappear. ...

In my house, when there is a an appliance that wants to connect to the internet, I go into my DNS server ( kea - www.isc.org ) and assign that appliance an IP address from a block that my firewall routinely blocks. (the "reservations" block of the IP4 kea config.)

I did that for the Sony DVD player here when I discovered that it was phoning home with all the DVs that I watched on it, apparently in a track-by-track level of detail.

Now, when that Sony DVD player tries to ping whitehouse.gov to ascertain if it has Internet access, it fails. And it no longer tries to upload my viewing habits.