IoT Security Is So Bad, There's a Search Engine For Sleeping Kids (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams. The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores. While IoT manufacturers are to blame, this also highlights the creepy stuff you can do with Shodan these days. At the start of January, Check Point recommended companies to block Shodan's crawlers. The infosec community came to defend Shodan, and even its founder said that Shodan is uselessly branded as a tool of evil, saying that attackers have their own scanning tools.

Comments

Johnny can't encrypt

[dfn5]

Security is hard and companies have to make their video surveillance products easy enough for a socker mom to install. Frankly I'm not surprised. Nor do I have a solution. As someone who has to provide tech support to family and friends I realize how hard it is to "just make it work" for those who couldn't care less about the technical details.

Re:Johnny can't encrypt

[__aaclcg7560]

As someone who has to provide tech support to family and friends I realize how hard it is to "just make it work" for those who couldn't care less about the technical details.

If you're not charging your relatives for tech support, you're doing it wrong. The fastest way to discourage relatives is to quote the hourly rate of your local mechanic ($100 in my area). If your relatives won't pay to have a mechanic fix the car, you can bet that they won't pay to have you fix the computer.