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Wink Hub smart home devices suffer outage caused by software update
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MacNN Staff
Join Date: Jul 2012
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Owners of the Wink Hub smart home device have endured a major service outage yesterday, following a software update. The outage, which lasted from 12:40pm eastern until 11pm, prevented the hubs from being able to perform general smart home functions, and though many hubs were able to recover from the incident, a number are having to be returned to the manufacturer and replaced.
According to the Wink support pages, hubs were "completely secure and never vulnerable," but was in fact caused by a "security measure" implemented early in the device's life. A misconfiguration of the security function caused the hubs to lose access to the Internet during the downtime, preventing the hub from accessing other devices, as well as accessing specific functions from the user's smartphone apps.
Wink has contacted all affected hub owners to replace bricked devices, as well as offering a $50 voucher to the company store, reports Engadget. One initial discount code provided to customers in the email has already been discontinued due to abuse, with customers now having to fill out a request form for a unique promo code to be sent between 24 and 48 hours later.
The company has also pulled Wink devices from stores, and it expects to resume sales "within the week."
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Last edited by NewsPoster; Apr 19, 2015 at 11:41 PM.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Jun 2004
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A rogue firmware update from a third-party?
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Grizzled Veteran
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No.
While that's always a possibility, that's not what happened here.
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it's impossible to say. what is known is that wink devices are controlled through a central hub operated by wink. the phone app connects to the wink hub, the hub transmits the request to the home or office device. wink collects home wireless network credentials (network name and password) from its customers.
in this case the hub was down for ~12 hours, cause in pr-speak. a malicious operator could have sent any number of requests to home devices during that time, including firmware updates. it's also possible that the devices were exploited (maybe something as harmless as sending them instructions, not new firmware or collect wifi passwords), and wink refuse to reconnect them to the hub out of an abundance of caution.
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Grizzled Veteran
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That's also entirely possible, and, if that's really what happened, would have required that Wink blatantly lied about the causes of the issue to their customers.
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Forum Regular
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Who actually thinks it's a good idea to send control of your home to some for-profit company over the internet?
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