Smart home devices can streamline a lot of your day-to-day tasks. With an internet connection and some simple automations, you may never have to carry house keys, turn off the lights, or touch your thermostat again. But all of this convenience comes at a potential cost, as smart tech is vulnerable to attack by cyber actors, leaving your personal data and your privacy at risk.
Here’s what you need to know to secure your smart home.
Is your smart home secure?
The short answer: not by default. Smart homes have vulnerabilities at multiple levels, from the devices themselves, to your home network, to the physical endpoints, like your phone, that have access to and control over your Internet of Things (IoT)
To start, IoT devices may have weak built-in security protocols or lack clear instructions to help users lock them down from factory settings, leaving them vulnerable to hackers, who may have to exert very little effort to access your data or spy on you. Wifi routers and smart home devices often have default credentials that are publicly available and therefore easy to get past—and data show that the vast majority of users have never changed their router admin password or adjusted any factory settings. If your home network isn’t secure, nothing connected to it can be considered secure either.
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