The recent spate of Internet of Things hack attacks have me more than a little worried, is this a herald of things to come, will you have you be wary of your household appliances? 10 years ago, the idea that your fridge or toaster could be working against you was nothing more than a plot line for a low budget B movie, but these days with internet connected appliances and lax cyber security this is now a very real concern, with the frequency of such attacks increasing with shocking rapidity.

As technology develops at such a fast pace, suppliers rush to be the first to provide you with this new and exciting tech, even if it has not yet reached its full potential. This is exactly what has happened with the Internet of Things. Suppliers have jumped on the bandwagon in an effort to be seen as forward thinking and innovative companies, but the reality is nothing more than pointlessly stuffing chips in bog standard items and selling them at 10 times the price. I myself have genuinely seen such products like a smart water bottle - a drinking bottle that connects to your phone so you can see how full the bottle is and how much water you’ve already drank. This instead of simply looking at the bottle itself to tell you.

Because of the race to get these connected products onto the market as quickly and cheaply as possible, it is patently clear that the security of these devices were not properly researched or secured before flooding the market, as evidenced by the recent Dyn attack, in which tens of thousands unsecured “Internet of things” web connected devices were hijacked and used as a botnet for a targeted attack on the DNS service provider, the largest DDoS attack to ever occur. While one of the main product suppliers, Chinese electronics firm Hangzhou Xiongmai who supplied a large bulk of the unsecured webcams that were hijacked, has since issued a product recall, there has been no word from any other suppliers of the smart tech as to whether they will do the same or leave their products dangerously unsecured.