Who can hack the most popular smart devices? Bitdefender's IoT Village hosted in Techsylvania is ready to roll

You’ve probably read in our latest report that, as security becomes more entwined with the physical world, protection against physical manipulation needs to be addressed, too. Mobile devices can be stolen. If someone hacks into the memory of an IoT device and reads the encryption key, every identical device becomes vulnerable.

This is a real problem for both consumers and the industry as a whole. The IoT opens a completely new dimension to security – it is where the Internet meets the physical world. If projections of a hyperconnected world become reality and manufacturers don’t bake security into their products, consequences can become life-threatening.

“Constrained in memory and computer resources, IoT devices can’t always support complex and evolving security algorithms”, the report says. “Another setback is that IoT products don’t include long-term support or automatic firmware updates despite being created with longevity in mind.”

That’s exactly why we brought 10 smart devices to Techsylvania, the leading technology event in Eastern Europe, the world’s most prolific IT hub, hosted in Cluj Napoca, Romania, where all participants can hack one or more of the devices available. The most successful can keep the device they hacked.

“Sometimes, backdoors are included in IoT terminals by the vendor itself,” Bitdefender Chief Security Strategist Catalin Cosoi noted in a recent blogpost. “We found smart home devices that have default passwords such as 123456 embedded in the system, as a backdoor introduced by the vendor for possibly support purposes. Obviously, this is not security, but sheer negligence.”

This April, researchers from Bitdefender Labs examined four Internet-connected consumer devices and found several common vulnerabilities. The analysis reveals that current authentication mechanisms of internet-connected devices can easily be bypassed to expose smart households and their inhabitants to invasion of privacy.

To prevent this, IoT security needs an integrated home cybersecurity approach. That means shifting from device-oriented security to a solution able to protect an unlimited number of gadgets by intercepting attacks at their core: the network. Bitdefender BOX is a forward-thinking, powerful piece of hardware that acts as an antivirus for networks and provides advanced malware protection for all connected devices.

Meet the Bitdefender team and BOX there!