While Dave Granlund’s cartoon on 3/16 justifiably ridiculed Kellyanne Conway’s some-other-planet take on wired devices capable of spying on you, it’s well to keep in mind that at base she’s right. Your Internet of Things (IoT) devices can indeed spy on you.
In the IoT industry’s rush to be early to market security was completely absent. For the most part it still is. The result is that the vast majority of IoT devices can be easily compromised. If it has a camera or microphone and it’s connected to the internet it can be hacked, and once under someone else’s control it can spy on you. If a compromised IoT device, even without a camera or microphone, is on line it can still spy on you by having its use monitored.
To date the biggest IoT compromise has been to use hacked devices as a botnet, that is, many devices (often in the millions) under some miscreant’s control to use as s/he sees fit, say for a denial of service attack. But that can and will change as criminals write the malware to use for spying.
While you think of this, consider autonomous vehicles. There’s no reason to expect them to be totally secure. The manufacturers will take security vastly more seriously than today’s IoT devices, but criminals will find ways to hack them. It may be extremely difficult, but if the vehicle control systems can communicate to the outside world the vehicles will be hackable. And if it has a voice recognition feature, guess what: it will be able to spy on you.
So Kellyanne, like so many of her colleagues in Washington, may be living in a fantasy world, but fantasy worlds often have a disturbing tendency to become tomorrow’s reality.
K. A. Boriskin
Bellingham
