How criminals could be spying on you inside your own home through household gadgets linked to the internet - including your TV, baby monitor and even your KETTLE

Midday on an industrial estate in North Yorkshire and a van pulls up outside a furniture-making company to be loaded up ready for a delivery.
Meanwhile, 250 miles away in London, workers check the till and stock the shelves at a high-end shop selling cigars and whisky. At much the same time, children emerge from a school in the Midlands, ambling through the playground as they move between lessons.
They may all be mundane, everyday activities, but that makes it all the more chilling. Because these three scenes were recorded on private security cameras at those locations in England, only to end up being streamed, live, via a website in Russia that anyone, anywhere in the world, can access at the click of a button. Around the clock, day and night.

The footage is among that taken from more than 500 sites in the UK — from cameras in businesses, churches and even inside homes.
One stream features four views from a British house labelled as ‘car’, ‘door’, ‘path’ and ‘patio’. Another shows a garden, littered with toys. Recently — via the Russian website — a man could be observed walking along the path by his house, but it could have easily been his kids caught on camera.

Not that he will have known his family’s comings and goings were being broadcast around the world. Because while the cameras were installed to improve security, what they show is how easily modern technology can do the very opposite.
The cameras in question were either not password protected or they used pre-set passwords that are known to hackers. As a result the footage, which is broadcast via the internet, and is meant to be viewed only by the cameras’ owners, can be accessed by anyone with a modicum of technological savvy.

Because like never before, consumers are adopting a new range of technologies that have connectivity to the internet built in to them — the so-called ‘internet of things’.
And these gadgets are now commonplace in our homes. By 2025 it is estimated that globally there will be 75 billion internet-connected items.
Many of these devices are ‘always on’ — monitoring, filming or recording in our homes around the clock. But like webcams and CCTV cameras, their vulnerabilities are now becoming apparent.
As well as exposing our personal data, cyber-criminals are able to take control of these gadgets and use them to launch co-ordinated ‘attacks’ on organisations and infrastructure, flooding them with data.

‘The internet of things is one of the scariest parts of the security landscape at the moment — it is the soft underbelly,’ says Professor Alan Woodward, a cyber-security expert at Surrey University.

‘No one will attack the strongest part of the wall, but the weakest. As a cyber-criminal, why take on something protected, such as a laptop, when you can far more easily attack a fridge or toaster?’

Then there is the new generation of virtual personal assistants, with Amazon’s Echo leading the way.
Echo is a wi-fi-connected, hands-free, smart-speaker fitted with seven sensitive microphones. Sit it on your kitchen table and tell it what you want. In response, it will read out a recipe, check a train time, help with homework or even crack a joke.
It can also connect wirelessly to smart-home appliances to control lights, ovens and security systems without homeowners having to access an app. At its heart is ‘Alexa’, its voice and artificial brain.

Last month, a survey of 15 devices by Which? found that eight were vulnerable to hacking. Having set up a home with gadgets, the consumer group invited a team of security researchers, SureCloud, to hack it.
One of their most disturbing discoveries involved a range of toys by CloudPets. These include cuddly cats, unicorns and bears costing as little as £5.99. Not only could the hackers use the toy to listen to what was going on in the room, they could also use it to send messages.

‘Building on a recently published flaw, SureCloud hacked the toy and made it play its own voice messages,’ Which? reported.

‘While our test was harmless, in the hands of someone with malicious intentions, the same hack could enable a stranger to speak to your children directly from outside your house. To give them instructions, perhaps. Or to ask them to come to the front gate to “meet Daddy”.’

Previously, baby monitors have been accessed in a similar way. Two years ago a nanny in Texas reported how as she changed the nappy of her one-year-old charge she was startled by a man’s disembodied voice talking to her and commenting on her actions. ‘He kept telling me it was a cute baby,’ the woman said. ‘I thought, my goodness, are they watching me right now?’

It turned out that the baby monitor had come with a pre-set password that had not been changed.

Dr Jason Nurse, from Oxford University, says crooks could make the devices record all the time — without the owners knowing.

‘They could hear you discussing your holiday plans, so they know when you are away and could burgle you,’ the cyber-security expert recently told the Cheltenham Science Festival.
‘They may hear you buying something on the phone, giving away your credit card details. You should think twice about what you say in front of these devices.’

The ease with which routers and other devices such as smart TVs can be hacked has also been charted in a series of documents leaked by the website Wikileaks.





http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4686872/How-criminals-use-household-gadgets-spy-you.html

Yep many years ago on forums, I said that it was possible to be spied on via a TV set and a friend of mine called Melfi said it was the daftest thing she had ever heard.  

Lo and behold ......

Thing is, today's fantasy/nightmare/dream is tomorrow's reality.