UC Santa Cruz students Alexander Sherbrooke and Iakov Taranenko told TechCrunch that they discovered a security bug that allows anyone to remotely send commands to laundry machines run by CSC and operate laundry cycles for free.
Sherbrooke said he was sitting on the floor of his basement laundry room in January 2024, and was able to run a script of code with instructions telling the machine in front of him to start a cycle, despite having $0 in his laundry account. The machine immediately woke up with a loud beep and flashed “PUSH START” on its display, indicating the machine was ready to wash a free load of laundry.
In another case, the students were able to add a balance of several million dollars into one of their laundry accounts, which reflected in their CSC Go mobile app as an entirely normal amount of money for a student to spend on laundry.
The two discovered that CSC’s servers could be tricked into accepting commands that modify their account balances, because any security checks are done by the CSC Go app on the user’s device and are automatically trusted by CSC’s servers.
CSC ServiceWorks is a large laundry service company, having a network of over a million laundry machines installed in hotels, university campuses and residences across the US, Canada and Europe.
Sherbrooke and Taranenko sent the company several messages through its online contact form in January 2024, but heard nothing back. A phone call to the company landed them nowhere either, they said. They first disclosed their research in a presentation at their university cybersecurity club earlier in May.
Days after the story was published, CSC provided a statement thanking the security researchers and promising to fix the bug.
Read more about it here.