World’s Leading Hackers Explain Why You Don’t Want Huge Tech Companies Controlling Everything in Your House | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/investigations/ef-con-25-hackers-deride-internet-things-internet-sht
The internet of things is a way to extract wealth from your every day life.
The term was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, a British technology pioneer at MIT. But it was presciently forecast by inventor and futurist Nikola Tesla in 1926, “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain … and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple ... A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."
The first smart device—a toaster that could be turned on and off over the internet—was developed for an earlier tech convention in 1990. Why you need to turn your toaster on and off over the internet is unclear, but in 2017 the list of these programmable objects has expanded exponentially. “Every single device that’s being put in your home probably has a computer in it now,” says Christopher Grayson, a security expert and red-team hacker currently working for Snapchat. He lists water bottles, locks and even a WiFi slow cooker as just a few of the items that are being networked.
Unfortunately, massive organized botnet attacks are not the only problem with IoT devices. Not only are they a potential entry point for unwanted intrusion into your home, they are also extruding private information from your home. Companies are acknowledging that they have plans to monetize the data they are collecting from these smart objects.
What’s more fun than hacking into things? Hacking into things while winning serious street cred and cash. DEF CON 25’s IoT Village challenged hackers to pit their skills against the security of Small Office/Home Office routers. Eighty-six teams competed to discover the 0-day (undisclosed) vulnerabilities that were required to earn points. Teams were up late into the night, sometimes all night testing their skills against the security provisions that companies had put in place. Ultimately all the routers in the contest fell victim to the hackers. Independent Security Evaluators, the company that organizes the village, claims that the winning team Wolf Pack was able to exploit all 18 routers in play, capturing the “flag” and the $500 prize. Is your router one of the ones they hacked into? You might want to check.
