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How you can protect your smart devices from cyberattack

Today’s digital products are ‘a computer hacker’s dream’ – leading to a huge rise in the online theft of personal documents, bank details and identity fraud

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You can help to improve your smart home’s security by changing the default usernames of all your interconnecting electronic devices and create strong, unique passwords, instead of those set by manufacturers, which cybercriminals will probably already know. Photo: Darktrace

Digital home assistants do offer a lot of convenience.

You do not need to get off the sofa to adjust the lighting and can live greener by commanding appliances to activate only when you need them.

Yet what happens if your products using the Internet of Things (IoT) – the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items that are embedded with electronics, software and sensors which enables them to connect and exchange data – go rogue?

An Amazon Echo speaker, which is connected to the voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service Alexa. Photo: Shutterstock
An Amazon Echo speaker, which is connected to the voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service Alexa. Photo: Shutterstock

Recently a couple in the United States discovered that their Amazon Echo home hub, which uses Alexa software, had recorded one of their private conversations and sent it to an employee in the husband’s contact list.

Amazon later responded that “an unlikely string of events” had led to the error, and conceded that the device had misinterpreted the couple’s speech – as artificial assistants tend to do.

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