Vacuum cleaners, printers, aquariums… Before supermarket fridges, these connected objects targeted by cyberattacks

Vacuum cleaner, printer, aquarium… Is everything around us now at the mercy of a cyberattack? The hacking of French supermarket fridges on Monday October 12 highlighted the too often forgotten vulnerability of connected equipment. If the maneuver marked people's minds by its scale - millions of euros of food stocks were destroyed - it was however far from being the first alert.

Already in 2017, printer owners saw their machine start up on its own to output a sheet with an enigmatic message and a drawing of a robot. At the time, the hacker Stackoverflowin claimed responsibility for hacking 150,000 printers, installed in both private and professional homes, of all brands (HP, Brother, Epson, Canon, etc.). He had coded a program detecting any device connected to the Internet without protection to infiltrate it, without intending to do harm: the message invited people to disconnect the printers to protect them...