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Hundreds Of Smart Locks Get Bricked By A Buggy Firmware Update (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the world's-smartest-bricks dept.

An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: On Tuesday, August 8, smart locks manufacturer LockState botched an over-the-air firmware update for its WiFi enabled [RemoteLock 6i] smart locks, causing the devices to lose connectivity to the vendor's servers and the ability to open doors for its users... The device costs $469 and is sold mainly to Airbnb hosts via an official partnership LockState has signed with the company. Hosts use the smart locks to configure custom access codes for each Airbnb renter without needing to give out a physical key to each one. The botched firmware bricked the device's smart code access mode. Physical keys continued to work. The botched firmware was a nuisance for private home owners, but it was a disaster for Airbnb hosts, who had to scramble to get customers physical keys so they could enter their rents.
The post includes tweets from angry lock owners, one complaining about a two-week wait for a replacement. The company is also offering to fix the defective units within "5-7 days," promising that "Every employee and resource at LockState is focused on resolving this for you as quickly as possible."

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Cloud equivalent by CaptainOfSpray · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yet another data point to underpin the motto "Never allow any data or access or service that you value to be controlled by Somebody Else's Computer"

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    "Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
    1. Re:Cloud equivalent by Kergan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      However big a QA screwup this is, at least give this company credit for actually trying to upgrade their firmware.

  2. Re: Inside Job... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Mark another in the "win" column for the DevOps model: traditional development release cycles could never have bricked so many devices so quickly.

  3. Re:QA testing.... by Minupla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In most companies I've worked in, *you* don't decide. You raise the risk to your risk management team, who breaks the bad news to the people who get paid to make the 'hot seat' decisions.

    So failure analysis suggests one of the following happened, all of which fall under the "QA" side of the business processes::

    1) QA was not thorough enough to detect that this firmware update would have enough of a worse failure rate to raise business risks to an unacceptable level.
    2) Risk management wasn't doing their job
    or
    3) Management made a poor business call on letting this go out, and didn't plan for the risk coming to pass (e.g. with pre-staged replacement devices, prepared messaging, etc)

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    On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before