How to Kill Your Family(63)
It was her mention of the sauna which really piqued my interest. It seemed like the set-up in a crime novel and I had visions of infiltrating her house, perhaps as a maid, before shutting her in the sauna and watching her beg for mercy. Perhaps this wasn’t exactly feasible. But the remote element appealed, and it felt like a house connected to the internet would be worth at least a little research. Could you use this technology to nefarious ends? Was it completely secure or could it be hacked with little effort?
The web was full of stories about smart devices breaking down, malfunctioning and messing up. Couples who’d split up when their AI gadgets accidentally mentioned the name of a mistress, children exposed to swear words, kettles boiling for hours on end and heating systems which were impossible to work. But the really interesting flaws in this kind of intelligent design were in the security element. There was a spate of scare stories online about people breaking into baby monitor streams and parents hearing strangers talking to their children at night through the devices. There were reports of burglar alarms being easily hacked into and silenced well before intruders even entered the house. Frazzled families claimed that their smart devices had been taken over by criminals who demanded ransoms to stop tampering with the temperature and playing music at all times of the day and night. In most cases, this was because the system which these devices ran on was not encrypted nor updated. Sure, some of these companies took it a little more seriously, but most businesses just sold you the kit and told you to make sure you had a good password.
I had to find out whether it would be possible to hack into the system Janine had, but where to start? I couldn’t just type ‘how to find a hacker’ into Google and take my chances (I actually did do this initially, and felt incredibly foolish for days afterwards). Moving on, I searched for academics who were doing research on smart devices, and found a woman who’d written a paper on the future implications for home security in the era of smart houses. She worked at UCL and, God bless our higher education system, her email address was right below her name on the website for anyone to find. I emailed Kiran Singh from the mailbox of [email protected] and asked her if she’d have some time for an interview. I told her I was hoping to place a piece with the Evening Standard on the dangers of inviting this kind of technology into our homes.
Everyone always wants their name in print. Even though print is dying on its arse, people still get excited to see themselves mentioned. Online, you disappear within minutes mostly. But your gran can tear out the page of a newspaper and show her mates. Perhaps frame your achievement in the downstairs loo, where you’ll see the paper yellowing and curling every time you go in there to pee. Academics are no different. Kiran emailed me back within an hour to say that she’d be happy to speak to me and was the coming Friday any good?
We met at the café in the British Museum. Her idea, and a nice change from the normal banality of grabbing lunch from one of eight million Pret A Mangers in this city. I went armed with a notebook and a tape recorder, bought that morning from a tech shop on Tottenham Court Road, in the hopes that it made me look somewhat like a journalist. The recorder was guaranteed to be simple to use, I was told by the slightly desperate man selling it to me from his empty shop, nestled between two furniture megastores displaying identikit pale pink velvet sofas in the window displays. I switched it on and hoped for the best.
Kiran was a nice woman, if a little earnest, sitting at a table sipping green tea when I got there, but easily identifiable as an academic. Normal people don’t wear cords. They think about it, perhaps even try some on in the near permanent half-price sale at Gap. But ultimately they realise that they cling to you, collect fluff like no other fabric on earth and worse still, they make you look like an academic. After some small talk, she was happy to get down to the topic in hand, and gave me a ton of helpful information on whether it was possible to use this technology to hurt someone. Kiran thought there was one obvious way she could see a hacker using these smart home devices maliciously. If you could obtain access to the owner’s hub, then all bets were off.
The hub, she patiently told me once I’d asked her to go back and explain it again, was the brain box running all the gadgets in a smart home. It sends out commands and they obey. The hub can instruct the thermostat to increase the temperature in a home, or tell the TV to update the channels. Once a device is marked as ‘trusted’ by the hub, it’s in the network and can converse with all the other gadgets.
Some of these smart devices run on end to end encryption. ‘Amazon is generally pretty good with cloud security, but I wouldn’t touch Ergos devices with a bargepole,’ she said, sliding a finger across her neck. A lot of them didn’t though, given that the companies are smaller and the resources limited. There were easy ways to get access to the hub, Kiran told me – if you can obtain the serial number from the owner, then it’s a piece of cake.
‘I see people post it online all the time,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Even if it’s not handed to you on a plate, there are ways of getting it by force if you’ve got basic hacking skills.’
Once a hacker gains control of the smart hub and the devices connected to it, the smart home can become a weapon for the person in charge.
‘You could use the homeowner’s cameras to spy on them,’ she said, ‘or gaslight someone by turning on music at certain times of day, opening doors, closing blinds.’ I suppressed a smile, she wasn’t to know how wonderful her hypothesis was. ‘But mostly, we’re not at that stage yet. Most people buy an Alexa or a Google device and use it to order milk. Sure, those devices are hackable, but the real danger is when everything in your house is connected, and we’re not there yet. That technology is still in its infancy, the preserve of the very rich.’