Internet of Things. How to Avoid Threats | Free Antivirus Software
In a typical modern home, you can easily count up to half a dozen LAN-connected devices that are not computers, tablets, or smartphones. These are smart TVs, printers, game consoles, modems, routers, media players, satellite receivers, security and alarm systems, and even refrigerators - in general, such devices that have recently been united by the term "Internet of things".
In 2014, David Jacobi tested how easy it is to hack into his own home and found a lot of interesting things. For the test, we chose popular devices such as a USB adapter for video streaming, an IP camera and coffee maker controlled from a smartphone, and a home security system that can also be controlled using an app. The manufacturer and the specific model for all types of devices were selected at random.
The Internet of Things as “Internet threats” . There are many ways in which criminals gain access to users' personal data.
As it turned out, all of them can be hacked or deceived in one way or another and used for their own purposes. The vulnerabilities were reported to the manufacturers. As a result, some problems were resolved, while others remained "as is." One of the sad features of the Internet of Things is that only the manufacturer of this most intelligent kettle can fix all the security problems of a smart kettle, but its owner is often unable to do anything .
At the same time, if it turns out that the kettle was sending Spam, participated in DDoS attacks, and generally behaved badly on the Internet, since it was infected with some nasty thing and was a botnet member , then the user is to blame. Although, by and large, the fault lies with the manufacturer, who advertised in detail why the kettle really needs Wi-Fi , but did not bother to protect it.
Recently, there was a scandal involving a website broadcasting videos from webcams and baby monitors around the world . The manufacturers' omissions allowed attackers to take full control of the camera: watch and listen to what was happening in the room, play any audio recording from the device at their discretion, extract the superuser password in order to remove or modify the camera software. Remember how in films they replace video from cameras with fake ones? So, this is not an invention!
It is approximately clear how, with the help of intruders, baby monitors and adapters can ruin our lives. But what could be wrong with the coffee maker? The fact is that, voluntarily or involuntarily, a fancy coffee machine can turn out to be a "godsend for a spy" and give hackers a password from your home Wi-Fi. It turned out to be quite difficult to solve this problem, and the manufacturer has not yet patched the vulnerability. However, everything is not as sad as it seems: the time window for stealing a password is only a few minutes. The downside is that no matter how much you change your Wi-Fi password, the coffee machine will be ready to hand it over to hackers again and again, with each new setting of the device.
In all of these cases, cybercriminals simply exploited the fact that the creators and users of the devices did not think much about security issues.
To make it easier for people to detect vulnerabilities in those smart things that are connected to their home network, special IoT Scanner application for Android that allows you to analyze your home network, get a complete list of devices connected to it and identify they have typical vulnerabilities.
Once installed, the IoT Scanner scans the local network and detects all the devices that are connected to it. Next, the program polls certain network ports on these devices and finds out which of them are open and which are closed. If the IoT Scanner detects open ports on some devices that can potentially be used by attackers for hacking, the application will warn about this and offer to close such ports - to close a potential loophole for infection.
But not all devices allow doing such a thing as closing a port at all. And if one of the devices in your home network does not have such a function, then this is a reason to think : do you really want to live next to such an unsafe thing? Maybe it is worth replacing the "smart" kettle with unclosed ports for a model without extra "brains"? You decide.
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