With the holidays upon us, it is the time of year to find fun and quirky gifts for those relatives that seem to have everything. One growing trend this holiday season is getting “smart home” devices to link with an automated home system: locks, alarms, light bulbs, thermostats, even coffeemakers– all that connect to your smartphone via wifi. While these items are undoubtably intriguing gifts, there is reason to give pause before investing in one.
There is precedence for such items being susceptible to hacking, and such hacking can provide entry points to other important systems in your home. Many of these smart devices are controlled with centralized apps, and if you can gain access to one device on such apps you could potentially influence any of them. Even smart devices focused on security, like locks and alarms, are not difficult to hack into.
These hacks are even more dangerous because these devices are smart devices with access to your home’s private network. By hacking these devices, they could gain access to your wifi network’s credentials and monitor your network activity.
At this point, a healthy measure of distrust in these smart devices is necessary. As technology improves and security becomes an increased priority in such devices, we can trust more of our lives to smart hometechnology. Until then, it might be best to not provide these smart deviceswith access to important personal information.
As always, stay safe out there.
Jake Malony, on behalf of the team at PJ-Networks
