Hacking health home automation devices: beware of danger!

It would seem that the increasing proliferation of smart devices in our homes is also implying a growing increase in piracy of health home automation devices.

A study on the hacking of health home automation devices indeed reveals many fundamental vulnerabilities in these products.

This new report, from a team at Ben-Gurion University, has revealed that many of these devices are remarkably insecure and can be easily compromised in less than 30 minutes. "It is really scary to see how easily a criminal, a voyeur or a pedophile can take control of these devices," said Yossi Oren, one of the researchers in the latest report.

The team examined 16 smart health home devices, including baby monitors, health home security cameras, doorbells and thermostats. They have discovered a variety of ways in which hackers can compromise these devices. But the most amazing thing is that hacking health home automation devices is particularly simple if you can find the default passwords set at the factory.

It may sound silly, but several studies have found that a large volume of people do not change passwords programmed by default. A security research company discovered that 15% of the devices analyzed still use the default values; while more than 1,000 remote IT professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom found that 46% of these professionals still used the default password.

"By using these devices in our laboratory, we were able to start music via a baby monitoring, turn off a thermostat and operate a camera remotely," says Yossi Oren.

The researchers suggest that, although manufacturers need to better secure these devices, there are simple ways to better protect their health home devices. Obviously, the first thing is to use strong passwords and not use the same password on different devices.

"We hope our findings will empower users and help educate manufacturers and consumers about the dangers inherent in the widespread use of unsecured IoT devices. Says Yael Mathov, another researcher on the project.

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