How to protect your smart-home devices
By Marcia Heroux Pounds Sun Sentinel
S
o your holiday gift was a new smart-home device. It could be Amazon’s Echo, often called “Alexa,” or Google Home using “Siri,” which provide music, news updates and other information features; iRobot Roomba to clean your floors; the Ring doorbell, or a smart TV for voice-command video. Maybe you’re thrilled with your gift, or maybe you’re a bit wary, given recent reports of cyberhacking of some devices. Internet-oriented devices can make life simpler, through voice-activated commands and remote operation, but they also can allow access to cyberhackers looking to steal your personal information. “Everything is hackable. If you can access it, others can access it,” said Yair Levy, director of the Center for E-learning Security Research at Nova Southeastern University in Davie. “Any new device you add, you add another (security) hole.” Still, billions of smart-home devices have been sold. “Some people are saying, ‘I don’t care,’ ” said Levy, who teaches his students about the hacking dangers of smarthome devices. But if you’re still sold on the convenience of using an Alexa or a Roomba, here are some expert recommendations for setting up and operating the device: READ THE MANUAL Don’t skip over the instruction manual for your smarthome device, which has important information that could affect you down the road. “You’re so excited to play with the new device that you go ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ ‘yes’ while setting up the device,” observed Tim
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Rader, director of product development for security company ADT. The Boca Raton-based company developed the Alexa Guard app to integrate its security product with smart-home devices. “Don’t be in too much of a rush,” he said, saying that there may be options that could have an impact on privacy and security. Change the device’s password Many smart-home devices come with a manufacturer’s password to set them up. Don’t use the device with this password because it’s easily found online. Create a unique password for the device, and not one you’ve used for another account. Reza Azarderakhsh, associate professor of computer science at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, said that while changing the password for your device is always a good idea, it shouldn’t give you a false sense of security. “It doesn’t make you secure against a serious cyberattack,” he said. So step it up by changing your password every 90 days, another expert says. Rader recommends consumers find a “scheme” that will help them remember a password, such as the words from a song you like. Then mix the words with lower and upper case letters, numbers that are not repetitive, and special characters, such as an ampersand, asterisk or dollar sign. USE TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION Better yet, more smart-home devices are adding two-factor authentication, which means you’re providing another piece of information beyond a password. Often it’s a randomly generated code. After some reports of login information being exposed on the Ring doorbell device Ring, more than 3,000 users were
