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 Mariah 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. 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low-end or outdated, the fact that there isn't one standard for how IoT gadgets are designed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 a greed 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's 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. 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 a 2.4GHz network and more sensitive devices on a 5GHz 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 get 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 watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up
in the comments section with your suggestion for topics that we should cover in the future.