Roomba Roomba cha-cha- cha

Is your vaccum spying on you? Because that would suck!  Is it a smart home iRobot Roomba?

Thanks to an Avast blog article by Gonzalo Torres last
August, the knowledge that these smart chip appliances
can tell the world all about you is no joke.

In a discussion about smart appliances, I found out that
if you own a smart television, you shut it off at the box
first then the shut off button and leave the tv and box
pointing at one another for a few minutes. Danger over.

These cool dudes are picturing information about your
home while they do their job. Your Roomba in particular
as it strolls around picking up dust.

iRobot, makers of the home cleaning robot Roomba, are
busy making a deal with big box retailers to share what they
call the ‘rich map of the home‘ of their users with the likes of
Amazon, Apple and Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

‘Hackers in particular as Your robot friend is sending data to
the cloud through your home WiFi, and if your home WiFi is
not properly secured, the potential exists for someone with
enough tech-savvy to get him- or herself a neat map of the
contents of your home.’

When all is said and done, buy a broom or control your bot

Buy the cheap Roomba. It can’t connect to Wi-Fi. It just, you know —
vacuums your floor.

Buy the fancy Roomba and disable the cloud sharing function in the
iRoom Home app.

Set up MAC address filtering on your router. This is a bit tech-intensive,
but it boils down to this: every device you connect to the net has a
unique Media Access Control (MAC) address   You can give your router
a list of MAC addresses, and tell it not to let anyone in unless they’re
on the list. This works to stop any Wi-Fi-capable appliance in your
household from connecting to the net. Check your router
instructions; it’s worth looking into.

And one we should all be doing to stop hackers- change default
passwords on all devices that have not been changed from the
original or for a fairly long time. Have you heard or read about
the powerful botnet dubbed Mirai?

It sounds dramatic, but regular people’s internet-enabled devices –
routers, webcams, printers, roomba vacuums, and so on – were
used in a massive online attack that shut down a huge part of the
internet for hours one Friday morning last October.

Does your Internet security provide you with access to scan for
vulnerabilities in your home networks?

Until you do a scan, the question remains, how smart are you
about your smart home?

till next time …

  Fran Klasinski- warriorlady
Mentoring you with common sense
Marketing with finesse

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© 2017, Fran Klasinski. All rights reserved. on republishing any parts of this post, you must supply a link to the original post