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Posted 29 janvier 2016

Christmas and New-year’s holidays are always a good occasion to give and receive trendy and modern gifts. Maybe this year, you have received a useful smart object, or a useless one from this list (http://www.internetofuselessthings.io), that have made you happy? But your happiness might be ruined by what follows…

Experts agree that all smart objects are now hackable! Almost all of them have now a connecting version, the problem being that nearly all of them suffer from a conception weakness in terms of security.

On the Internet of things (IoT) ground, we are dealing with security levels information systems had 20 years ago, i.e. a level close to zero!

It’s thus the moment to think about how dangerous the objects given or received on Christmas Eve are…

Some of these objects have made it to the headlines, which allows to draw a top 8 hackable objects based on their notoriety:

– Cars: The most interesting example was the hacking of a Jeep            (http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway ),

– Smart sniper rifle which has WIFI aim assist (http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target ),

– Smart bathroom scales,

– Mini drones (certainly one of the big hits for 2014 and 2015 gifts),

– Baby monitors (babyphone, etc.),

– Smart fridges (which have leaked owners’ Gmail addresses),

– Security cameras, of course,

– Smart padlocks, which link to digital locks in hotels…

Among those that are rarely gifted at Christmas (J), we can mention SCADA industrial control systems: by attacking Iranian centrifuges in 2010, Stuxnet (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) has entered the global hacking history, but problems have also occurred inside dams in the USA…

“last but not least”, connected toilets that change your life: http://bgr.com/2014/06/12/smart-home-toilets-hacked.

In 1964, Disney studios created a great movie called “Mary Popins”. One would remember the scene when objects went completely mad after the kids have released and lost control of Mary Popins magic… Technology advances shouldn’t drive us towards a world where control loss over objects would make our lives hell…

http://www.alphr.com/features/389920/hacking-the-internet-of-things-from-smart-cars-to-toilets

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/opinion/zeynep-tufekci-why-smart-objects-may-be-a-dumb-idea.html?_r=1

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