your smart home is actually stupid and i don't mean that
your smart fridge is pointless well it is but what i'm talking about are the
now ubiquitous smart gadgets in your house that aren't smart enough to
protect themselves or the rest of your network they're like the tech equivalent
of dodo birds small iot products like lights thermostats and cameras can be
easy vectors for hackers to put malware on your home network or steal your
information and attacks like that can put anyone who
connects to your network at risk in 2016 the mirai worm famously created
an iot botnet so massive that it took down amazon twitter reddit paypal and
netflix by unleashing a ddos attack on these sites dns provider but what
exactly makes iot devices such attractive targets for attackers for one
thing smart gadgets are often a lot less complicated than computers tablets or
phones which is just as much of a selling point for bad actors as it is
for your parents the latter kind of products have both
stored and handled sensitive personal data for a long time so the engineers
who design hardware and software for them make security a priority you can
find everything from advanced encryption to dedicated security chips on a wide
variety of phones and pcs these days but iot devices often miss out on all this
fancy protection this is because the smart gadgets in your home only do a
very limited range of things a smart plug might do nothing but turn a light
on or off a smart garage door only opens and closes and a smart fridge will only
screech at you to buy another overpriced water filter
these things require very little processing power so iot devices usually
aren't equipped with the latest and greatest cpus or socs and as such are
limited in their security capabilities instead they might be operating on a
design that's either many years old or produced to be as cheap as possible i
mean no one would ever buy a smart toaster if it ran on a 400 core i7 even
though that would definitely make your toast taste better but underpowered
hardware is far from the only reason iot devices are easy to hack we'll tell you
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right now even if the hardware inside your favorite smart lock isn't particularly
low end or outdated the fact that there isn't one standard for how iot gadgets
are designed and built presents other security challenges there are different
protocols smart devices use to communicate such as wi-fi z-wave zigbee
and bluetooth meaning there isn't an upon set of practices to secure the
incredibly broad range of iot devices out there
all of these protocols have different vulnerabilities not to mention that
these products usually have many highly specialized components from lots of
different suppliers making it difficult to coordinate a security strategy and
close as many attack vectors as possible
then you have the fact that the device specific software simply isn't up to
scratch one common weak point is the use of
hard-coded passwords these are default passwords built into the device of
software that cannot be changed by the user and are not chosen at random
although this makes it easier to access settings it significantly increases the
chances that an attacker could guess or uncover the password and force their way
into your network even though you spent all evening coming up with the absolute
masterpiece that is
unh4cka8l3-6969 of course nice even without an obvious backdoor like a
hard-coded password software for iot devices is often rushed out in order to
keep costs down or meet a release deadline or it can be configured out of
the box with minimal security to make setup easier this means that even if a
product is shipped out without glaring defects in code simply setting it up
with the manufacturer's default settings can introduce a big security hole for a
home bottom line research your stuff before you buy it
tweak the settings to plug obvious security holes and put iot devices on a
separate network if you can one simple way to do this is to put iot
on 2.4 gigahertz network and more sensitive devices on a 5 gigahertz
network though there are ways you can split up your network even more securely
look many businesses do what they can but with so many people working from
home and remotely connecting to a company network it wouldn't be
surprising to see some multi-million dollar trade secret gets stolen by a
hacker who made it through the work laptop of some middle manager who bought
a 10 wi-fi enabled egg cart
was it worth it harold can i call you harry so thanks for
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