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“Alexa, curtains up. Alex, coffee on.” Smart home ecosystems are very much here, and they’re often held together by the glue of a virtual assistant: Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, or Apple’s Siri. These systems bring your compatible devices together to work as one, but they don’t do all the work for you. Even if your Alexa orders your groceries and makes your ice, you still need to sort out your own home security.
Connected smart home devices present real security risks. While some of these are inherent in the device (i.e., the collection of your voice data), others can be protected if you take the right steps.
What are the risks of a smart home ecosystem, and what can you do to minimize and mitigate them? Thankfully, while the risks are abundant, protecting your home from intruders is more about taking basic steps than fighting off hackers.
What are the Risks of a Smart Home Ecosystem?
The biggest risk in any smart home ecosystem is internet connectivity. These devices are connected to the Internet 24/7/365, which means they are also targeting all the time. What’s more, there are already billions of devices with more on the way. In other words, these devices are prime targets for hackers because there are simply too many entry points to cover them all.
Perhaps the biggest risk of a smart home ecosystem is that the connectivity between devices means that a breach doesn’t impact just one device. It can affect all other devices on your network including phones, laptops, and smartwatches.
Planning for a smart home device breach isn’t a matter of “if” as much as a matter of “when.” At the end of 2019, ZDNet published a list of 13 of the biggest hacks of the year. One of them is believed to have been committed by a 14-year-old. Fortunately, many attacks boast similarities, which is good news for device owners when setting up a cybersecurity strategy.
How to Protect Your Smart Home
Much of consumer cybersecurity comes down to three simple concepts: frequent updates, password hygiene, and secure wifi networks. None of them require more technical know-how than you already need to set up a smart home ecosystem. The trick is to treat cybersecurity like essential home maintenance that’s no different from mowing the lawn or inspecting your winter furnace.
Let’s start with frequent updates. Smart device manufacturers roll out updates for their software that provide security fixes and patches identified since the previous update. If the manufacturer knows about a hole in their software, then hackers usually do too. As a result, it is incredibly important to update your smart devices to ensure you’re always running the latest version of the software. And don’t forget to update your router firmware, especially if you have an older model that doesn’t update itself.
Second, choose your passwords wisely and change them regularly. It’s also important to avoid using the same password over and over again. Doing so leaves you vulnerable to an attack called “credential stuffing,” which occurs when a compromised, frequently used password is used to try to gain access to the rest of your accounts or services. Anonymous passwords are the best way to go because it protects you even if an old password list gets stolen.
Finally, you need to protect your wifi network. Your router should have a strong password, and it should be changed on a regular basis, as annoying as that sounds. Ideally, you should also run two networks. Use the first network for connecting your phone and computer and devices that you use to access personal accounts like iPads or smartwatches. Then, connect any smart home devices to the second network. In the event of a breach from a smart home device, the hacker will have a more difficult time accessing your core devices, at least over your wifi network.
If you want to go even further, get into the habit of skipping public wifi. Connecting your devices to public wifi can make them vulnerable to hackers and compromise your devices.
Choose Your Devices Carefully
Ultimately, you’ll need to choose your devices carefully and weigh the benefits vs. the security risks. It’s helpful to buy devices from companies actively patching their software and using internal security measures to mitigate breaches when they do happen.
A good example is Amazon’s Ring video doorbell. Ring offers video surveillance of your front door when someone rings the doorbell as well as alerts you when someone lingers by your door. It’s easy to set up and use. While the Ring doorbell has had security concerns in the past, you can still enjoy the protection it offers by ensuring you use a unique, anonymous password and two-factor authentication to help ward off serious breaches. Keeping it on a secondary wifi network only for devices, as already noted, will also help.
Smart devices can add a huge amount of value to your home or apartment, but they also carry vulnerabilities. It’s up to you to do your part to keep intruders out so that you remain protected, even if the device manufacturers’ defenses fail.
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