The smart home can really enhance the quality of life. Imagine that you can operate the TV, dishwasher, and sweeping robot by lightly tapping the screen of a mobile phone. When people stand in the distance, they can give orders to their smart devices. However, fresh things like smart homes are not perfect. Because a lot of important information of users is bound to these devices, once a hacker uses a vulnerability in a smart home to conduct a remote attack, the privacy of the user may be leaked, and these devices may even cause harm to people when they are out of control.
It could be terrifying. Is the smart home really unsafe? In fact, the smart home industry is developing too rapidly to take care of security issues. Instead, many smart home manufacturers pay more attention to functional innovation. Therefore, they provide attackers with the possibility of intrusion. At present, smart life is the general trend, and the widespread application of smart homes is only a matter of time. While enjoying the surprises brought by cutting-edge technology, we should also learn how to use these smart products safely. Here are 5 tips for securing your smart home safety:
- Check permissions upon installing a device. As most smart home devices tend to have very generous data permissions set as the default, it is important to make sure you take a look through the privacy settings to make sure you’re only sharing what you’re comfortable with when you install each device. For additional security, you can use a non-identifiable login that is not connected to any other account or service.
- Keep an eye out for devices that are always on. Some smart devices’ function as waiting for motion, voice, or other prompts that will make them spring into action can often be abused by hackers. Considering either turn off or restrict these functions may help in ensuring you’re not constantly under surveillance. Besides, you should also be extremely cautious where you enable voice service integrations as these may be accessible by hackers.
- Update and patch your devices. As manufacturers regularly release software updates with security fixes that improve the security of their devices, it is important to check updates and patches every week. Hackers tend to wage large campaigns based on known vulnerabilities, attempting to break in anywhere where the updates have not been installed. By regularly updating your software, you can eliminate the risk posed by such attacks altogether.
- Secure access. Change default passwords to sentences and enable multi-factor authentication for all applications. In addition, it is necessary to limit system admin to parents and force children and visitors into non-system admin account “non-trusted.”
- Separate your devices. Hackers will often use unsecured devices as an open door to access other parts of a network. Maintaining a dedicated IoT network or a specific IoT only wireless network at home is a way to prevent hackers from using a hacked device as a foot in the door.
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Credits:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/Hacked-ring-home-security-cameras.html
