Gee Whiz! Connected Hotel Room Controls Vulnerable to Hacking

Security researcher Matthew Garrett found that a London hotel's wall-mounted Android tablets used Modbus over TCP without authentication, allowing him (via Wireshark and pymodbus) to query and control lighting, televisions and curtains across rooms; captured traffic indicated room-related addressing (e.g., 172.16.207.14 correlating to room 714). The write-up highlights the broader IoT/building-automation insecurity risk in connected hotels and the potential for unauthorized physical-environment control, though no widespread exploitation was reported.