These electrical appliances have also been targeted by "hackers"? Please be careful!

In an ordinary home in Minnesota, lawyer Daniel Swenson was sitting on the sofa, watching TV leisurely with his family.

Suddenly, the robot vacuum cleaner made a buzzing sound. Strange, no one started it?

Svensson opened his phone to check the control app for the robot vacuum cleaner and was shocked to find an unfamiliar user . He restarted the robot vacuum cleaner and continued watching TV.

However, before I even got comfortable on the sofa, the robot vacuum cleaner came to life again! This time, the robot not only made a buzzing noise, but also spoke!

This scene is really funny, a sweeping robot that shines with a simple sense of technology suddenly turns into a rapper; on the other hand, it is also very annoying, because the robot starts speaking a series of swear words containing racial discrimination!

Eventually, the robot was first possessed by a hacker and then thrown into the basement by its angry owner.

This incident is a bit nonsensical, but it also teaches us a lesson: hackers no longer just want to hack into the top-secret folders of large companies!

After the Internet of Everything, hackers have more and more ways to go

There is more than one hacker who has invaded the robot vacuum cleaner.

On the same day that Svensson's robot vacuum was hacked, another robot vacuum in Los Angeles was hacked, reportedly swearing and chasing the dog around the house.

Just a schematic diagram丨giphy

The company to which the relevant brand belonged later issued a statement saying that this was not some advanced cyber warfare, but a common " database collision ."

The so-called "database collision" refers to hackers collecting leaked account numbers and passwords on the Internet and using this information to log in to different websites and services. If someone happens to use the same account number and password on different websites or apps, it is a "collapse."

"Bumping" the right account password has been common since the Internet became popular. In the past few decades, the impact on individuals may have been limited to the misuse of Internet accounts (familiar with: "My QQ was stolen, don't believe the money-borrowing message"), but now that all home appliances use smart systems, the impact of account theft has extended from online to offline.

Fortunately, hackers who rely on luck to invade usually do not have very advanced skills, and usually do not have "big ambitions" in their hearts. They just do small things to tease cats and dogs.

But some hackers not only expand their reach and start invading ordinary people's homes, but they also do some shady things.

These electrical appliances have also been targeted?

As more and more devices are connected to the Internet in our homes, the ways hackers can break in are becoming more and more unexpected.

1

If you don't give me money, I'll freeze you to death

At the 2016 DEF CON hacker conference, researchers from a British security company demonstrated a ransomware strain that attacks home thermostats.

Through the ransomware program, an intruder can remotely lock the thermostat's temperature, set it to extremely high or low, and display a ransom message on the screen.

This is really cruel. If you don’t pay, you will be freezing or dying of heat, and the electricity will be wasted. If you pay, do you know that 1 Bitcoin is equivalent to 500,000 RMB today?

“Your thermostat is permanently set to 1 degree Celsius. If you want to regain control, please deposit 1 Bitcoin” | OWASP London/Youtube

Note that this is not entirely a fictional case, but a real vulnerability that researchers found in thermostats . Of course, they also promised to fix the vulnerability as soon as possible.

I couldn't help but wonder: Is this a magic attack or a physical attack?

2

Let your refrigerator send spam

You never thought that the refrigerator could be hacked!

Hackers hack into refrigerators not to steal food or change the temperature to accelerate food spoilage, but to make the refrigerator do another incredible thing: send a lot of spam.

In 2014, the security company Proofpoint discovered a bizarre cyberattack in which hackers hacked into more than 100,000 devices, formed a botnet out of these devices, and sent more than 750,000 spam emails by controlling these devices.

Only about 75% of these compromised devices were devices with email sending capabilities, such as computers and smartphones. By analyzing device identifiers, Proofpoint researchers found that the remaining victim devices were Internet-connected TVs, routers, and even refrigerators.

Oops, using the refrigerator to send spam, does that count as kitchen waste? Which trash can should I put it in when I delete it?

Picture: giphy

There is one more thing. At the DEF CON hacker conference in 2015, security researchers discovered a vulnerability in a certain brand of smart refrigerator: when the refrigerator was connected to remote servers such as Google via WiFi, encrypted security authentication was not enabled, and hackers could use this vulnerability to steal users' Google login credentials.

People are so confident in their refrigerators that they never thought they could be targeted by hackers. The phrase "a refrigerator is not a safe" has more meaning at this moment.

3

Light bulbs infect your whole family

If thermostats and refrigerators seem to be related to "intelligence" and "technology", what about light bulbs?

In 2020, researchers successfully hacked into a smart light bulb and were able to remotely adjust the color and brightness of the bulb, turning your warm and peaceful home into a sparkling dance floor.

This is just the first step.

When you find a light bulb going crazy, you always want to correct it, right? When you reset the light bulb in your phone and connect to the network again, the light bulb has been infected with the virus and starts spreading through the network : sending a large amount of data to the bridge, triggering a buffer overflow and installing malware.

It turns out that this lamp has become the hacker's Aladdin's lamp!

Fortunately, this was just an experiment, and the manufacturer fixed the vulnerability in subsequent upgrades. However, this also exposed a problem: some imperfect smart devices have vulnerabilities, which can easily become a gateway to attack home networks - but these small connected appliances are often the ones we least care about.

Who would have thought that this cheap Internet-connected light bulb could be a gateway for hackers?

4

Even children’s toys are not spared!

Smart toys may also reveal some secrets. There is a teddy bear that can be used as a phone, so children can use it to make online calls with their parents far away, and of course, couples in different places can also use it.

The idea is romantic, but the company that designed this toy ignored the issue of data security. They have been putting user information and voice data in a database without firewall protection. As a result, in 2017, this database was hacked and more than 2 million recordings were published online.

We can imagine how many different consequences this will bring - fortunately this toy does not have the function of taking photos or videos.

The teddy bear used as a gun丨cloudpets.com

Ironically, just days before the database was hacked, Germany's telecom regulator issued a warning about internet-connected toys, saying that users' conversations could be monitored by hackers.

Wow, Teddy Bear is starring in a spy movie!

Although smart appliances have objectively broadened the path for hackers, the Internet of Things is still the trend of the future. After all, smart homes are really cool!

As consumers who do have privacy (or even savings), there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater . It is recommended to choose big brands when buying networked appliances (at least there is a place to complain if something goes wrong) and change passwords regularly to prevent "database collisions". In addition, you should pay attention to the update prompts of the smart appliance mobile phone app, because they may be fixing the bugs caused by hackers!

Planning and production

Source: Guokr (ID: Guokr42)

Author: Plath G

Editor: Yang Yaping

Proofread by Xu Lai and Lin Lin

The cover image and the images in this article are from the copyright library