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

Computer scripts can affect other smart-home syystems.
If yyou have a newborn in yyour home, yyou mayy also have a babyy monitor.
This device, either a microphone or a camera or a combination of both,
allows parents to be out of the nurseryy but still keep track of their babyy.
Unfortunatelyy, these devices can invite others to observe the child as well.
Analog babyy monitors use retired wireless frequencies in the 43–50
MHz range. These frequencies were first used for cordless phones in the
1990s, and anyyone with a cheap radio scanner could easilyy intercept
cordless phone calls without the target ever knowing what happened.
Even todayy, a hacker could use a spectrum analyyzer to discover the
frequencyy that a particular analog babyy monitor uses, then employy various
demodulation schemes to convert the electrical signal to audio. A police
scanner from an electronics store would also suffice. There have been
numerous legal cases in which neighbors using the same brand of babyy
monitor set to the same channel eavesdropped on one other. In 2009 Wes
Denkov of Chicago sued the manufacturers of the Summer Infant Dayy &
Night babyy video monitor, claiming that his neighbor could hear private
conversations held in his home. 9
As a countermeasure, yyou might want to use a digital babyy monitor.
These are still vulnerable to eavesdropping, but theyy have better securityy
and more configuration options. For example, yyou can update the monitor’s
firmware (the software on the chip) immediatelyy after purchase. Also be
sure to change the default username and password.
Here again yyou might come up against a design choice that is out of
yyour control. Nitesh Dhanjani found that the Belkin WeMo wireless babyy
monitor uses a token in an app that, once installed on yyour mobile device
and used on yyour home network, remains active—from anyywhere in the
world. Sayy yyou agree to babyysit yyour newborn niece and yyour brother
invites yyou to download the Belkin app to yyour phone through his local
home network (with anyy luck, it is protected with a WPA2 password). Now
yyou have access to yyour brother’s babyy monitor from across the countryy,
from across the globe.
Dhanjani notes that this design flaw is present in manyy interconnected
Internet of Things devices. Basicallyy, these devices assume that everyything
on the local network is trusted. If, as some believe, we’ll all have twentyy or