TECHNOLOGY - Easy Hack Smart Devices?

One of the wost ideas is a phone-app that allows you to unlock your door at home.  Ya, great idea, give the opportunity for a hacker access the app and unlock your door, or if you loose your phone.  Boy, high-tech robbers are going to love this one.  Then the car manufacturers who offer phone-app to control and unlock your car, while you can loose your keys or phone, you cannot hack the electronic key.

"Smart Devices That Make Life Easier May Also Be Easy To Hack, Says FTC" PBS Newshour 9/5/2013

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  New technology presents new concerns over privacy in unexpected places.

An ever-expanding array of appliances and household devices has made our lives easier and sometimes safer.  Now connected to the Web, they're becoming known as the Internet of things, baby monitors with cameras, home thermostats, even refrigerators.  These so-called smart devices are programmable and easy to access remotely, both by their owners and, as it turns out, by hackers.

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission cited one seller of Web-enabled video cams for its inadequate security protections.  It found that a breach in the company's software allowed hackers to post links to the live video feeds of its customers' security cameras.

Hari Sreenivasan takes the story from there.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  Kashmir Hill is a senior editor and writes the technology and privacy column "Not-So Private Parts" at Forbes.com.
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HARI SREENIVASAN:  Now, you said in one of your articles that there's even a search engine to help people find this.

KASHMIR HILL, Forbes.com:  There is a search engine.

It's called Shodan.  It's like Google.  But where Google crawls for websites, this actually crawls the Internet looking for connected devices.  And it's found all kinds of things.  It's found cars that are connected to the Internet, the cameras that we have heard about, building control systems for Google's headquarters in Australia and power plants and water filtration companies.

There are so many products now that are connected to the Internet, because it's so useful to be able to check on them or control things from afar.  But a lot of times, these products are being designed without good security, so that somebody can, one, see that they're there, and in some cases even go in and control those devices or access their streams.