The internet of things: privacy horror (03:26)

The internet of things: privacy horror

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Welcome to lesson two, topic seven. The internet of things: a privacy horror. In 2016, former head of the CIA James Clapper, is reported to have said: “In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” check the source down below.

The Internet of Things is the ongoing development of ‘smart devices’ that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies that are able to exchange data over the internet through a WiFi connection. Your television, dishwasher, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, thermostat, security camera, external harddisk. The list goes on and on. The main reason for people to connect those devices to the internet is to make them remote accessible. Being able to watch your security camera, turn on the vacuum cleaner and access files from your harddisk wherever you are in the world sounds awesome right?

Right, besides one thing. If it’s accessible to you through the internet, then it’s a potential target for hackers and others willing to harm you. And that does not need to be a personal thing. A lot of people don’t update the software of the device, or do not even protect it with a password.

Through a tool called Shodan you can basically scan the internet for people who don’t have a login on their “smart device” and it’s possible to find thousands of harddisks and that you’re able to access. And those are just the ones that don’t have a password protection. That still leaves room for the ones with the standard password, or an easily hackable one.

Through this trick you’re also able to access someones router and do basically the same as I explained in te previous lesson. A hacker can redirect the internet traffic to a fake banking website. While you think you are logging into your own banking website, you are logging in to the fake one the hacker created. Now the hacker know your login and is able to make use of this.

Another trick hackers use is to break into your router through a smart device, and use your router when creating a DDOS attack. This is basically trying to get a website down by overloading the server using a lot of different connections. Your router might be used in those attacks, and you don’t even know it.

So: the more devices you connect to your network, the bigger your chance is of getting hacked and expose a lot of your personal information to the outside world. That’s why James Clapper, head of the CIA, called the internet of things the ‘biggest opportunity for it’s business’. Therefore my advise would be: only connect devices to your network if it’s absolutely necessary for it to work. Congratulations on completing lesson two and I’ll see you in lesson three, where we will head into the fact that public and private domains are melting into eachother and why this could be dangerous. See you there!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/09/internet-of-things-smart-home-devices-government-surveillance-james-clapper

Eind 2012 maakte het televisieprogramma KRO Reporter een reportage over online printers, back-upservers en camera’s.24 Een van de apparaten die het programma onder de loep nam, was de populaire NAS-schijf van Iomega, een onderdeel van technologiebedrijf Lenovo. Daarop werden onder andere patiëntgegevens van artsen en correspondentie van de Koninklijke Marechaussee gevonden. Na die uitzending beloofde Iomega een software-update om het probleem te verhelpen.

Via Shodan vinden wij in Nederland nog steeds 1.119 Iomega-schijven zonder login en wachtwoord. Een woordvoerder van Lenovo vertelt ons dat Iomega sinds de uitzending is gaan werken met een ingebouwd standaardwachtwoord in de NAS-schijven. Toch vinden wij wereldwijd nog 15.202 exemplaren zonder wachtwoord. Bovendien is het standaard-wachtwoord via Google simpel te achterhalen.

Niet voor niets vertelde James Clapper, het hoofd van de Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten, in 2016 het internet der dingen als grote kans voor zijn diensten te zien.

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