Shhhhh! Quiet or the TV may hear us…
A piece of news that has been shown in February 2015 has recently been back on Facebook newsfeed: Samsung recognizing that Smart TV with voice recognition could capture and “send to third parties” personal data spoken by people near the devices. And the thought on this content made us think of somethings here at Konduto.
Many conspiracy theories have been disclosed during the discussion on the case of the South Korean company. It’s a fact that Samsung intelligent TVs can indeed “listen” to what is said near them and transfer these data to be processed by a third party in order to improve the voice recognition system.
But that is not the same as saying that the TVs are necessarily spies. This isn’t even news any longer in our lives. Samsung’s Smart TVs make the same activity your voice-activated smartphone and many other devices do (as long as, of course, you activate the device from the “Hey, Siri!” command).
According to a survey performed by HP Security Research, an independent safety research group with global recognition, 70% of the devices connected to the Internet of Things have severe safety breaches and are subjected to hacker attacks. The survey analyzed ten types of devices currently used for this type of use and found a total 250 vulnerabilities.
Anyway, you might be asking yourself now: “this is very wrong, where is my privacy?”. We are sorry to inform you, but your privacy (practically) does no longer exist. Nowadays, we are all giving up our privacy from the first day we use a dial-up dialer and wait a few seconds to connect to the Internet.
It is true. Our internet browsing leaves traces, very visible, such as the super-embarrassing clicks you might have posted at the beginning of the millennium at one of the flogs (and whose login and password you don’t even remember anymore to exclude them); or more discrete, such as the cookies that are placed in your machine at every page you visit. This is the price that is paid by being connected in several social networks, having e-mail services, listening to music, shopping online with just a click, and many, many other benefits the big network brings us.
But the resurrection of the Samsung case on Facebook put an important factor in evidence on the new IT wave planning to make information technology and connectivity more and more present in our daily lives – including the most trivial activities, such as regulating the temperature of the air-conditioning system.
Is the cybernetic safety of the Internet of Thinks being taken into consideration?
Not only smartphones, tablets, computers and intelligent televisions are connected to the internet – and consequently vulnerable to hacker attacks, very interested in all the data that may be available there. A few weeks ago, a security breach was found in several monitoring chambers connected to the great net, which could be watched by any person, anywhere in the world (read the full paper at Ars Technica). These images were from kitchens, garages, gardens, classrooms, and even the cribs of babies monitored by electronic nannies.
Yes, electronic nannies being hacked. Not only bizarre, but quite scary, isn’t it?
But calm down, our aim here is not to scare you.
Wow!
So… Whatcha talkin bout Willis?
We are online thank to computers, cell phones, tablets, TVs, video games, fitness bracelets.. and the trend is to be more and more connected. After all, the Internet of Thinks intends to connect refrigerators, ovens, coffee machines, air conditioning units, lighting systems, bicycles, cars,… several devices we use in our daily lives.
The idea is that the Internet of Things come to help us and ease our daily lives, but we must not forget that all these objects are connected and sending data on who we are, what we do, what we like, where we are, where we go, with whom we relate…
That is, it is clear that day after day we have less control of the information we generate on ourselves. Currently, we already live in a “data commodization” process. Our full name and the name of our relatives, our addresses, our e-mails, our phone numbers.. everything can be found by anyone knowing where to look for (or where to hack from).
And therefore, we ask you, online entrepreneur or risk manager, who investigates possibly fraudulent purchases against your e-commerce: is it reliable to score your risk analysis only on data checking?
…
Well, the answer is no. Checking name and ID is no longer the most efficient way of avoiding e-commerce frauds. And the case of “spy TVs”, or the unavoidable Internet of Things, only reinforces this trend that will continue in the years – or decades – to come.
It is necessary to go even further, and an alternative we strongly believe in is that a thief reveals himself by his own navigation in a virtual store. The navigation pattern of a legit client is very different from a fraudulent purchaser, and emulating this behavior is much more difficult (for a hacker in large scale, with the objective of making several purchases in a single store) than buying a batch with millions of data from credit card holders at the deep web. Don’t you think so?
About Konduto
We are a startup developing an innovative technology to bar e-commerce frauds. Our intelligent anti-fraud monitors the client throughout his purchase journey in your site and evaluates the transaction in real time – our answer is given in less than 1s! We detect only the purchases that are really suspicious, approving more orders and reducing the costs with frauds. Send us an e-mail on hi@konduto.com
