Your Smart Oven May Be Visiting Websites in China, Russia Every 5 Minutes

The smart oven installed in your kitchen may look innocuous enough, but it could be quietly surfing the internet and visiting websites in China and Russia every few minutes.

As The Register reports(Opens in a new window), that’s what security-minded software developer Stephan van Rooji discovered when he checked what his own AEG smart oven was using a Wi-Fi connection for.

As van Rooji explains(Opens in a new window), most devices with an active internet connection perform regular checks to ensure the connection is working. In the case of companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google, they have all created a “special endpoint” their devices attempt to connect to. However, some companies don’t bother taking the time to do that and instead check well-known public websites.

For AEG, the German company’s smart kitchen team picked three websites for its ovens to visit. Those websites are google.com, baidu.cn, and yandex.ru, and they are visited every five minutes. It means that if you own an AEG smart oven, there’s a good chance it’s connecting to servers in the US, China, and Russia 288 times every day simply to check it has an active internet connection. That’s assuming you took the time to hook it into your Wi-Fi network, of course.

Van Rooji owns the AEG BSK798280B oven and AEG KMK768080B combi oven, and both perform these regular checks. It’s unclear how many other AEG smart devices do the same, but it seems likely they will all follow the same procedure.

As you’ve probably already guessed, van Rooji decided to disconnect his AEG devices from Wi-Fi in order to stop them visiting websites. He also said AEG’s support department didn’t know what he was talking about when he contacted them. There’s also a big question mark over the usefulness of an internet connection in such devices. Unless you regularly want to preheat your oven using an app, what’s the point?