1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

More than a thousand university students in the Netherlands must continue to travel to wash their clothes after their building management company failed to bring its borked smart laundry machines back online.

The Spinozacampus laundry room, which caters to around 1,250 University of Amsterdam students, has remained closed since July after an unknown attacker tampered with all five machines’ digital payment system, allowing residents to wash their clothes for free.

The attack has still not been resolved. Management company Duwo kept the room open, allowing students to capitalize on the free washing services, for a few weeks, but now says it refuses to foot the bill.

The Register asked Duwo for more information, but we’re told its spokesperson is taking a long weekend, so all we have to go on is a brief statement given to Dutch site Folia, which first reported the news.

“Because we purchase the machines ourselves, we need the income to be able to continue offering laundry services to our residents at affordable prices,” a Duwo spokesperson said.

Spinozacampus’s ten analog laundry machines are available to residents. However, students reported frequent outages, leaving only one working machine at a time, so they often have to haul their dirty undies to and from the facilities on nearby Darlingstraat.

Students told Folia that they fear lice infestation in the building as a result of the laundry room closure.

The Register contacted the University of Amsterdam to understand what support it has offered students during this time, but it simply referred us back to Duwo.

So-called “smart” devices, or Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets, are often targets for attackers, although usually for the purposes of building robust botnets, rather than helping cash-strapped youths save a few euros on basic needs.

Attacks on laundry machines are even rarer. Occasionally, we’ll report on stories such as the infamous Swiss DDoS-ing smart toothbrush botnet – which (shock!) turned out to be bogus – or bugs in internet-connected TVs, but rarely do we see substantial real-world impacts of these things.

Alas, attacks on IoT devices are on the rise, if security vendor reports are to be believed. As of 2022, SonicWall said IoT attacks rose 92 percent amid a declining ransomware scene, which turned out to be short-lived.

More recent figures from the vendor’s annual report showed an upward trend, with an increase of 124 percent in 2024 compared to the previous year, although the primary targets under the broad “IoT” umbrella are cameras, specifically those deployed in critical sectors. ®

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