It was a dark and scary night - a modern Halloween tale

You’re at home, lounging on the sofa. It’s Halloween, but you don’t get overly excited about it -just a quiet evening watching your favorite scary movie on your new TV. After all, you’ve invested a lot in your home comfort- a smart TV, a Nest thermostat, smart lightbulbs, an intelligent door lock – everything made so you never have to leave the house.

While you’re sipping your hot chocolate, getting cozy and ready for the movie to start, a light bulb in your living room starts flickering. You try to ignore it but it really starts annoying you. After all, you paid extra cash for these bulbs to have a seamless experience and zero problems. While you grab a chair to look into it, the bulb turns red. You don’t believe in weird coincidences and immediately think there’s more to it that meets the eye: you remember setting it to red only if someone tries to break into your home. Wait, let’s not jump to conclusions! Your sensor-based alarm would have went off if somebody were breaking in, but you heard no siren.

You start to get seriously worried. You check the smartphone app connected with your home security system. No new notifications. Hmm.

Is it getting hot in here? You’re not imagining things. You are a bit sweaty. You go to your kitchen and see your thermostat is set at scorching hot levels. “I don’t remember adjusting it,” you think.

You go to verify the main door. What is happening? Is someone playing with your mind? All these state-of-the-art devices now secure your home and give you full control of your house, but you feel completely out of control right now.

All of a sudden, the power goes out. Looking out the window, you notice there’s no problem with the electricity in the neighborhood. What happened to your intelligent switch? Is it broken? Again, no alerts on your phone. Sitting in the dark, you’re convinced something is really wrong but refuse to believe in curses. You open the assistive light on your phone and go back to the living room. You sit down for a second to rationalize all these incidents. Out of the blue, the music gets louder and louder. And then even louder – you don’t believe in ghosts, but you don’t want to believe someone is controlling your Wi-Fi connected music player either. Wait. Wi-Fi? Could it be?

Epilogue

Don’t believe in coincidences, don’t risk losing your piece of mind. Let this be just another Halloween fantasy, not a reality. Protecting your home from cyber-intruders is as crucial to your safety as safeguarding it from thieves.

But enough with the gloom – we hope you get the idea and make sure this Halloween horror story never becomes a reality.

Here is a collection of fun designs to create Halloween-themed T-shirts.

Click “download for print” under each image to get the files you need to print. When you’re done printing, you can post pictures with you and your cool T-shirt on Bitdefender’s Facebook page. We are dying to see it!

Have fun, stay safe!