Today we are going to be analyzing smart home vulnerabilities. We will also be discussing how the growth of smart devices have exposed users to privacy and property risks.
Background
The number of smart devices is increasing, in 2018 it surpassed 7 billion and that number is still climbing rapidly.
There is good reason for that rapid growth, these devices have the potential to fundamentally change the way we live our lives!
For example, we have home cameras that can alert you when people move around your house, we also have the ability to control the locks in our houses with our smart phones and many other fantastic things.
But there is a hidden cost to all these benefits, a cost so large that if ignored, it could put the lives of you and your family in danger.!
These are smart home vulnerabilities.
Smart Device Risks
Hewlett Packard (HP) have shown that over 70% of all smart devices contain a security vulnerability. With each device having, on average, 25 vulnerabilities each!
This is highly concerning to say the least, but most concerning of all is Attackers have already started taking advantage of the vulnerabilities.
In 2016, an infection called the Mirai Virus took over hundreds of thousands of smart devices and used the aforementioned devices to attack various targets across the internet!
This smart home vulnerability caused a partial paralysis of the United States Internet. It also highlighted how little protection there is for the smart device owner’s safety and privacy.
What makes these even more frightening, is the owner’s of these devices were completely oblivious to it. They assumed their smart devices were functioning properly when in fact their smart devices were being used to perpetrate attacks at the scale of national terrorism!
As a smart device owner, can you answer the question “who has access to my smart devices?”. Probably not. Most smart device owners are like that. Not because they are bad people but because we are entering an new age a connected digital age. An age that brings with it immense promise but at the same time immense risk.
Conclusion
Smart Devices are the future, there is no doubt; but that future needs to be secure if you are going to gain any benefit from it.
The best way to minimize smart device risk and avoid smart home vulnerabilities is to get Simius. We give you the protection no else can!
Thanks for reading.
Sources
Yu, Miao; Zhuge, Jianwei; Cao, Ming; Shi, Zhiwei; Jiang, Lin. 2020. “A Survey of Security Vulnerability Analysis, Discovery, Detection, and Mitigation on IoT Devices.” Future Internet 12, no. 2: 27.
