The smart home of your nightmares!

As much as we love home automation, there is a dark side to it. When your fridge, security camera and thermostat are plugged into a network, it becomes vulnerable to a whole lot of dangers; hackers, malware, breakdowns and disruptions. After all the bad guys will always be out there, no matter how futuristic your home may be.

Take a look at some real-life horror stories about home automation that have made headlines…

Hacking baby monitors?

It’s a nightmare situation for parents. In April last year, a woman was a sleep in her home when she heard a man’s voice shouting at her 10 month old daughter in the next room. They discovered that someone had hacked into their internet-connected baby monitor and was yelling obscenities at the poor baby!

Breaking and entering

In 2013, the writer for Forbes, Kashmir Hill, wrote a fascinating piece talking about how he was able to remotely access eight different homes through a simple search engine query. The search showed smart home access points that were completely unprotected by a password. Hill wrote “I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets.”

Flushing away the problem

Japan is years ahead in one very specific area of home appliance technology – the toilet! Yes, the Japanese take their bathroom experience very seriously, they have enhanced toilets with heated seats, remote control features and bidet functions. According to a security company, it was possible for the Satis toilet to be hacked. An attacker could simply download the app and use it to cause havoc with the toilet, like flushing repeatedly or opening and closing the lid. This could be extremely distressing.

It looks like security issues are really darkening the future of home automation. It is even a fact that smart home devices are potentially much more vulnerable to attacks and disruptions that computing devices like your laptop, PC, phones or tablets.

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