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Most people in the reddit thread I saw seemed to assume botnet.

I'm not convinced though. That would assume that the washing machine was opening an external port on the user's router, which seems unlikely. I looked up a manual for one of the the washers which has the "ThinQ" feature and there's no mention of UPnP.

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Don’t need an open port to be a useful part of a botnet

Yes, but if it's behind a NAT gateway, how is it going to get the initial infection? I know there are ways, but realistically none of them make sense in this context.

Yeah, you'd need someone on the network to be doing something like browsing the internet and coming across a malicious website capable of making requests to other nodes on the local network, or downloading something that gives an attacker userspace access to scan the local network.

Those situations strike me as super rare, unlikely, and unrealistic, too.

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