The Nightmare On Connected Home Street

theodp (442580) writes With the battle for the connected home underway, Wired's Mat Honan offered his humorous and scary Friday the 13th take on what life in the connected home of the future might be like. "I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows," Honan begins. "The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don't know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically it's malware. But there's no patch yet, and pretty much everyone's got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal." Having been the victim of an epic hacking, Honan can't be faulted for worrying.

Comments

Uh-oh

[paiute]

Better return that USB Fleshlight

Re:Uh-oh

[dinfinity]

The times of your PC speaker blasting Yankee Doodle at 17:00 are long gone.

TFA is overlooking a very important part of how hacking and viruses work anno 2014 and that is that hackers and virus makers have gone from people just messing around to people making hard cash or disrupting very specific and powerful entities. If anything, the symptoms described would only be part of ransomware or some terrorist attack when directed at average Joes.

Like the devices targeted by most viruses today, these sorts of devices will mainly be infected to track and sell data, to be able to use them for ddossing or cryptomining, and as a vector to extract financial authorization data. I don't think the 'my house has a virus and now I'm hearing Skrillex every day' is going to be very prevalent.

Of course the threat is real and the results when being targeted specifically more dangerous (to the body) than in traditional hacking. In that sense, we do need to be extra concerned with safety when it comes to 'connected homes'.

What a joke..

[bjwest]

The internet of things is nothing but a marketers (and hackers) wet dream. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - there is no reason what so ever for each device to be directly connected to the internet, or have internet access, for that matter. The refrigerator doesn't need access to the internet, neither does the washer and drier, toaster, or even the thermostat. One home router and a single control unit is all that's needed, or both in one unit. Let that control your food, soap and dryer sheet inventory. Each unit can tell the control system when a unit of measure is used, and it can keep track. Access to the internet is limited to that one device and there aren't 20 different ways to hack into my network. Of course, this will never fly. Each manufacturer will want to hold the patents on the standards, so they can charge for what should be a free and open standard. No one will ever play nicely so the general public can benefit rather than the elite corporations.

Fuck them, I'm glad I have the skills and knowledge to do this on my own, without all their patent encumbered, insecure crap. Of course, my washer and drier, refrigerator and oven will remain dumb, as they should.

The 'Internet of Things' is the next NoSQL, RoR.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen, brother! Amen, amen, AMEN!

I've had to see through so many meetings now where some hipster dickweeds keep going on about the 'Internet of Things'. It is all so very tedious. It's just like three or four years ago, when they wouldn't shut the hell up about NoSQL. They said it would 'change the world' and we'd have to get rid of all of our real DB systems. MongoDB! Cassandra! Redis! They couldn't go 10 minutes without dropping one of those names, even when we were talking about rugby during lunch. And then they were proven wrong. Those technologies faltered and withered.

And it's just like four years before that, when these same hipsters had stiff, raging hard-ons for Ruby on Rails. It would 'change the world', they told us. We'd have to get rid of all of our web apps written in Java, PHP and Perl. Ruby! Ruby on Rails! DHH! Zed Shaw! Mongrel! The name dropping was maybe even worse than it would be for NoSQL. I couldn't go an entire work day without hearing some hipster verbally ooze lustful and quasi-erotic feelings for Zed Shaw. And then they were proven wrong. Those technologies faltered and withered.

The 'Internet of Things' is following the same pattern, and the outcome will be the same. The hipsters get excited about something stupid, the hipsters won't shut up about it, reality sets in, and their obsession becomes irrelevant when there's none of their hype surrounding it.

It doesn't matter if we want a "connected home"

[bluegutang]

It doesn't matter if we WANT a "connected home". We are going to have it, like it or not. In a couple decades, it will be impossible to buy an appliance that isn't "connected'. Connectivity will cost less than whatever the marketing companies will pay to track our habits, and all devices will include connectivity by default. We likely won't even be able to buy unconnected devices, because economies of scale will not exist to make them affordable.

Re:It doesn't matter if we want a "connected home"

[pla]

It doesn't matter if we WANT a "connected home". We are going to have it, like it or not. In a couple decades, it will be impossible to buy an appliance that isn't "connected'.

You could say that today about things like printers and TVs - They always seem to want you to plug in a network and tell them how to get to the outside world. But! We have one option that will always work - Don't plug it in. And if it uses wireless, well, you should already use MAC whitelisting on your router (yes, I know, not "real" security, but as with so many other things, it keeps the "honest" casual-thieves away).

Of course, with your TV, that will break functionality you may want, such as direct access to YouTube. With printers, I've never understood why they need to know how to get out of your LAN, they just need a valid local address; no gateway, no DNS required. And with your refrigerator, toaster, microwave oven? Sorry, but automatic restocking, a live video feed of the color of my toast, and remotely starting dinner don't really count as "killer apps" (except insofar as the last one will eventually lead to houses burning down as a result).

The real problem comes with more expensive things like cars, where the cost of giving it its own cell connection falls far short of the marketing value of selling out your driving habits; in that case, though, you can disable it, they just make it somewhat difficult (in the case of my most recent car, I needed to pull out the entire center console to get at and unplug the TMU). But overall, the way to keep your devices offline? Pull the plug, simple as that.

Re:It doesn't matter if we want a "connected home"

[fisted]

What makes you believe you couldn't run a wireless network inside a faraday cage?

Re:It doesn't matter if we want a "connected home"

[dissy]

With printers, I've never understood why they need to know how to get out of your LAN, they just need a valid local address; no gateway, no DNS required.

Most printer vendors these days offer a feature to print from the internet, and they figure (correctly I suspect) it's easier to have the printer connect out and poll than to explain how to port forward something through a home router to the average customer.

HP for example assigns the printer an email address on one of their domains, and the printer just polls the mailbox.

I suppose under the asumption one wants such a feature, this is the better way to go about it...

Re:This is what happens

[ArcadeMan]

I just tried to apply for a job where they required 6 years of experience in Swift.

Re: Just run it on OpenBSD, for crying out loud.

[dotancohen]

It doesn't really matter what the operating system is if the security bug is inside the software you need to run.

I think that was the point. Other than BIND, what runs on OpenBSD?

Re:This is what happens

[ColdWetDog]

There's nothing unreasonable about that. Yes, Swift was just publically announced a few days ago. But you need to show that you have experience with it if you want to get the job that uses it. The best way of checking if somebody has experience is to see how long they've been using the technology. It doesn't matter if it was released tomorrow, today, yesteday, last month, or decades ago. If you're good enough for the job, then you'll already have 6 years of experience with Swift. If you don't have the experience, then you just aren't good enough. Is that really so hard to understand?

Now I know what our HR manager is doing at her desk. Hi Sandy!