Hackers are in your home and they are entering through your smart devices
The ‘internet of things’ is marketed as making life easier, more convenient and better connected, but the sensors, software and technologies that communicate on its networks are easily hackable, risking not only your privacy but the security of you and your family
An eight-year-old girl stands petrified, frantically looking for the intruder in her bedroom. She can hear him playing an eerie version of Tiptoe Through the Tulips but she cannot see him. “Who is that?” she asks, and he answers, “I’m your best friend. You can do whatever you want right now. You can mess up your room. You could break your TV.”
The girl, close to tears, yells, “Mummy!” But the prospect of a parent arriving does nothing to deter the intruder. “I’m Santa Claus,” he says. “Don’t you want to be my best friend?”
This is not a scene from a Hollywood horror movie. This happened for real last December in a suburban house in Mississippi, in the United States, to Alyssa LeMay, but it could have happened anywhere. The intruder was not hiding in Alyssa’s room, he had hacked into an internet-connected camera installed by her parents to keep an eye on her and her three siblings, and he was grooming her through its speaker.
“I did the opposite of adding another security measure,” says Alyssa’s mother, Ashley, after unplugging the Ring security camera. “I put the [children] at risk and now there’s nothing I can do to ease their minds.”
I felt invaded. A total privacy invasion. I’m never plugging that device in again because I can’t trust it
In Port Talbot, Wales, a month later, 38-year-old Paul Davies and his family can hear voices outside their front door, but nobody is there. Then his phone rings and a man says, “I’m waiting for you outside. I want to batter you. If you don’t come out, I’m going to steal your car.”
When the man asks if he might see Davies’ three children, the situation seems to be spiralling out of control. But again, the intruder is not there. He has hacked into the camera in the family’s smart doorbell and has been watching their comings and goings remotely.