Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

When smart is dumb

We are living in the age of "smart".

Our phones are smart, our TVs are smart and pretty soon most of the appliances in our homes will be smart.

Advances in microcontroller technology and ubiquitous communications has meant that we can effectively add "smarts" to almost anything you can think of.

These smart items can deliver features and functions that were unthinkable just a few years ago.

A TV that lets you surf the Net == Woohoo!

A phone that allows you to order pizza and navigate your way around the unfamiliar streets of a foreign city -- fantastic.

A fridge that automatically re-orders staples such as milk and butter when it detects that you're getting low -- amazing.

However, as with all things, there appears to be a bit of a problem.

While we're all very familiar with the threats that proliferate online when using our desktop PC or laptop, we're only just waking up to the rapidly escalating level of threat that our other smart devices are facing.

Viruses, trojans and worms are already making their presence felt on smartphones, where they can spam, mine for bitcoins or simply hold your device ransom.

And, in Europe, a new threat has emerged for those who have smart TVs.

According to this BBC story millions of smart TVs are vulnerable to an attack that is launched not by way of the Net but by way of a radio-frequency broadcast.

Once compromised, these smart TVs can be used to spam, launch denial of service attacks on others and even snoop around inside a poorly configured home network.

This vulnerability must be extremely attractive to would-be crackers because the use of a small transmitter, it becomes much harder to track the origin of the break-in and in densely populated areas, that single transmitter can reach hundreds or thousands of vulnerable sets.

Most people would not realise that their sets had been hacked until it was too late and, short of disconnecting the TV (thus rendering it less-smart), there appears to be no way to defend against the attack.

Just as worrying is the response of the standards body who are responsible for the standards which appear to allow this attack. Their position is that they don't feel the level of risk the vulnerability represents is sufficient to justify a fix.

I wonder how many other "smart" devices will end up being thrown out prematurely, simply because some form of vulnerability is considered insufficiently important to merit a fix. After all, there's a lot more money to be made by forcing the customer to buy a new set than by fixing the flaws in the old one.

Another worry is that as our devices become increasingly smart -- their ability to function at all when "disconnected" from the world may be compromised.

Maybe smart is a really dumb idea after all.

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say in the Aardvark Forums.

PERMALINK to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font