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Education

Smart home devices not safe enough, can be hacked easily: Study

indiatoday.in

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With the rapid increase of smart devices in our homes, researchers are revealing crucial vulnerabilities in these off-the-shelf items. Off-the-shelf devices that include baby monitors, home security cameras, doorbells, and thermostats were easily co-opted by cyber researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

As part of their ongoing research into detecting vulnerabilities of devices and networks expanding in the smart home and Internet of Things (IoT), the researchers disassembled and reverse engineered many common devices and quickly uncovered serious security issues.

“It is truly frightening how easily a criminal, voyeur or paedophile can take over these devices,” says Dr Yossi Oren, a senior lecturer in BGU’s Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering and head of the Implementation Security and Side-Channel Attacks Lab at Cyber@BGU.

“Using these devices in our lab, we were able to play loud music through a baby monitor, turn off a thermostat and turn on a camera remotely, much to the concern of our researchers who themselves use these products.”

One of the PhD students and members of Oren’s lab Omer Shwartz, said,

“It only took 30 minutes to find passwords for most of the devices and some of them were found only through a Google search of the brand. Once hackers can access an IoT device, like a camera, they can create an entire network of these camera models controlled remotely.”

MORE ABOUT IT:

1.The BGU researchers discovered several ways hackers can take advantage of poorly secured devices.

2.They discovered that similar products under different brands share the same common default passwords.

3.Consumers and businesses rarely change device passwords when purchased so they could be operating infected with malicious code for years

4.They were also able to login to entire Wi-Fi networks simply by retrieving the password stored in a device to gain network access

TIPS FOR IOT PRODUCT SECURITY

With the goal of making consumers smarter about smart home device protection, BGU researchers offer a number of tips to keep IoT devices, families and businesses more secure:

1. Buy IoT devices only from reputable manufacturers and vendors.

2. Avoid used IoT devices. They could already have malware installed.

3. Research each device online to determine if it has a default password and if so change before installing.

4. Use strong passwords with a minimum of 16 letters. These are hard to crack.

5. Multiple devices shouldn’t share the same passwords.

6. Update software regularly which you will only get from reputable manufacturers.

7. Carefully consider the benefits and risks of connecting a device to the internet.

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