Crock-Pot® Serves Dinner to Hackers

While all of this is great, having smart devices like these on your wireless network comes with risks. Those include opening up yet another way for hackers to get inside your home. Remember that with every entry point, it makes it just that much more likely that someone will make themselves at home in your home and on your computer where you probably store a lot of sensitive and confidential information. This doesn’t mean it will happen. It just means it’s another way for them to get inside and get right to your information or perhaps use your computer as a bot or to perform distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) as happened recently on several websites including Twitter, Amazon, and Netflix as well as many other large and small companies. They could also plant ransomware and try to extort money from you before they will give you a key to decrypt the files.

Make sure you really want or need those smart devices before hooking up items in your home to wireless. Take some time to think about how much risk you want to take. Do you really need to your refrigerator to tell you that you’re out of milk or can you open the door and look yourself? Do you need to be able to spy on your dog when you’re at work all day? Do you need to be able to control your Crock-Pot® after you’ve left it to cook up dinner for you? What benefit will it give you to have all of these devices and entry points opened up to the Internet? If the answer is little or none, perhaps you should skip them. It’s not so hard to push the “on” button on the Crock-Pot® after all. Those are meant to set and forget anyway. You probably already have enough to remember throughout the day anyway. At least you can forget your dinner.

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