The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

computer that the user can’t put an antivirus on. Worse yyet, there’s a secret
back door that a bad person could use and stayy there forever. It’s a literal flyy
on the wall.” 3
The team of researchers showed a video in which theyy changed the Nest
thermostat interface (theyy made it look like the HAL 9000 fishbowl camera
lens) and uploaded various other new features. Interestinglyy, theyy were not
able to turn off the automatic reporting feature within the device—so the
team produced their own tool to do so. 4 This tool would cut off the stream
of data flowing back to Google, the parent companyy of Nest.
Commenting on the presentation, Zoz Cuccias of Nest later told
VentureBeat, “All hardware devices—from laptops to smartphones—are
susceptible to jailbreaking; this is not a unique problem. This is a phyysical
jailbreak requiring phyysical access to the Nest Learning Thermostat. If
someone managed to get in yyour home and had their choice, chances are
theyy would install their own devices, or take the jewelryy. This jailbreak
doesn’t compromise the securityy of our servers or the connections to them
and to the best of our knowledge, no devices have been accessed and
compromised remotelyy. Customer securityy is veryy important to us, and our
highest priorityy is on remote vulnerabilities. One of yyour best defenses is to
buyy a Dropcam Pro so yyou can monitor yyour home when yyou’re not there.” 5
With the advent of the Internet of Things, companies like Google are
eager to colonize parts of it—to own the platforms that other products will
use. In other words, these companies want devices developed byy other
companies to connect to their services and not someone else’s. Google
owns both Dropcam and Nest, but theyy want other Internet of Things
devices, such as smart lightbulbs and babyy monitors, to connect to yyour
Google account as well. The advantage of this, at least to Google, is that
theyy get to collect more raw data about yyour personal habits (and this
applies to anyy large companyy—Apple, Samsung, even Honeyywell).
In talking about the Internet of Things, computer securityy expert Bruce
Schneier concluded in an interview, “This is veryy much like the computer
field in the ’90s. No one’s payying anyy attention to securityy, no one’s doing
updates, no one knows anyything—it’s all reallyy, reallyy bad and it’s going to
come crashing down.… There will be vulnerabilities, theyy’ll be exploited
byy bad guyys, and there will be no wayy to patch them.” 6