Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Nightmare On Connected Home Street

Posted by timothy on from the coming-from-inside-the-house dept.

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.

2 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Uh-oh by paiute · · Score: 5, Funny

    Better return that USB Fleshlight

    --
    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    1. Re:Uh-oh by dinfinity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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'.