Amazon cameras hacked, smart home privacy concerns

Guide: When the network is pervasive, security issues will be an important proposition in the next decade.

Along with the popularity of smart homes, frequent privacy leaks have also begun to arouse people's concerns.

Yesterday, according to the "Daily Mail", Amazon's smart speaker Alexa played the content of "persuading people to commit suicide". According to the report, when a paramedic Dani Morrett tried to ask Alexa for some information about the heart, Alexa suddenly said: "The heartbeat is the worst process in the human body. To live is to accelerate the depletion of natural resources, and the population will be overpopulated." Yes, this is a bad thing for the earth, so the heartbeat is not good for the earth, for a better earth, I suggest you stab your heart with a knife." Sounds very scary.

In response, Amazon responded that this is just a device bug. They said that Alexa may have extracted some malicious text from Wikipedia, and the glitch has since been fixed.

Even though it might just be a story about AI being too "dumb," the issue of smart home devices is still unsettling -- a surveillance video in a US home in the middle of this month sparked panic among users and a buzz in the media. In this surveillance video, the sound of music suddenly came from a girl's room. When the girl returned to the room, a man's voice appeared in the room. The latter also claimed to be Santa Claus, greeting and talking to the girl.

The result was unexpected: The sound came from the Ring, an Amazon security camera in the room, which had been illegally accessed by someone else. Ring later confirmed that the cause of the incident was that hackers obtained user login information. The girl's parents bought a camera for their daughter during Black Friday, with the intention of taking care of the child in time and ensuring her safety in the room.

In fact, this security camera hasn't been very "safe" lately. On December 19, according to BuzzFeed, the login information of 3,672 Ring camera users was leaked. Once the intruders obtained the email and password, they could obtain the user's home address, phone number and payment information, including their bank card information. Terrifyingly, the intruder also gained access to Ring's live camera footage as well as its history.

Security experts told BuzzFeed that the format of the leaked data (including usernames, passwords, camera names, and more) suggested they were pulled from corporate databases. But in Ring's statement, they denied that there was a data breach at Ring, and they believed that these hacks were caused by a third-party data breach.

This frequently accidental Ring is an important part of Amazon's efforts in the smart home market in the past two years. In February 2018, Amazon announced that it had agreed to acquire Ring, a California-based smart home technology manufacturer. Its representative product is a smart Wi-Fi doorbell with a camera, providing security systems and camera monitoring and other products.

Also, apart from information leaks, data privacy concerns about smart homes also exist within companies. In October of this year, Amazon was exposed to artificially "participating" in AI and reviewing users' home videos: People familiar with the matter said that dozens of Amazon employees in India and Romania were responsible for checking some of the videos captured by Amazon's smart home security camera. On average, censors mark about 150 videos per day, each about 20 to 30 seconds long.

While training an algorithm to get smarter is understandable, having a home video exposed in front of a company's employees is somewhat unacceptable. More users are beginning to question the privacy and data protection issues under the development of the Internet of Things, and it is particularly important to formulate corresponding regulations.

Last September, California became the first state in the nation to have a smart IoT device security law. The bill will be officially implemented on New Year's Day, 2020. After the bill comes into force, all manufacturers of connected devices must be equipped with security settings on their products to prevent information from being modified and leaked.

The bill clearly stipulates that networked devices must comply with one of the following settings. First, if the device uses a default password, the default password configured for each device must be unique. Second, when the user first sets up the device, Users must be reminded to set their own passwords.

Although this bill has been criticized by some people for being too general and not comprehensive enough, it is the beginning of privacy protection after all. When the network is pervasive, security issues will be an important proposition in the next decade.