Technology-filled smart homes have come a long way since Rosie the robot housekeeper catered to the Jetsons' needs. But one thing the Jetsons never seemed to worry about was Rosie turning on them or being used as a surveillance device.Smart home mishaps can and do happen. Just ask the German computer science professor who rigged up his house so that everything from lights, music, and TV to heating and cooling was connected to the Internet and could be turned on and off remotely. Sounds great, right? Until the house froze up and stopped responding to his commands.
Was a nefarious hacker to blame? No, the culprit was a light fixture that had burned out and was trying to gain the hub's attention by sending continuous requests that overloaded the network, a classic denial-of-service (DOS) attack.
The professor knew his way around a network and was able to diagnose the problem himself, but are all the consumers of smart home technology -- expected to become a $12 billion annual business by 2020 -- so tech savvy?
Not all solutions to smart home snafus are as simple as changing a light bulb. And millions of Internet-connected devices flooding the market and our homes are less secure than a PC or smartphone. As Daniel Buentello said in a Black Hat tech session in which he needed just 15 seconds to break in and gain remote control over a Nest thermostat: "The more convenient or smart something is, the less secure it is. What are we giving up just for me to be lazy on my couch?"
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