IoT Security

In a report on mobile security updates, the US Federal Trade Commission finds that because of the complexity of the mobile ecosystem applying security updates to operating system software on some mobile devices is time-consuming and complicated. Based on information gathered from eight device

In October 2017, the farm equipment manufacturer John Deere began requiring American farmers to sign an agreement forbidding almost all repair and modification of the equipment they buy and also preventing them from suiting for software-related problems. In response, the began hacking their John

The French data protection regulator, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), has issued a formal notice to Genesis Industries Limited, the maker of the connected toys My Friend Cayla and I-QUE. Genesis has two months to bring the toys into compliance with data protection

Recognising that many parents will be considering purchasing connected toys and other devices for their children, for Christmas 2017 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office issued a list of 12 guidelines for assessing products before purchasing. These include: research the product's security

Logitech's announcement that it would end service and support for its Harmony Link devices in 2018 sparked online outrage after consumers realised this meant the devices would be disabled and that only those with devices still under warranty would get free replacements. Logitech has since said it

Owners of the Hong Kong-based sex toy company Lovense's vibrators who installed the company's remote control app were surprised to discover that the app was recording user sessions without their knowledge. They had authorised the app to use the phone's built-in microphone and camera, but only for

The UK consumer watchdog Which? has called on retailers to stop selling popular connected toys it says have proven security issues. These include Hasbro's Furby Connect, Vivid Imagination's I-Que robot, and Spiral Toys' Cloudpets and Toy-fi Teddy. In its report, Which? found that these toys do not

An investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner has led Eir, a telecommunications company, to replace almost 20,000 modems supplied to customers with basic broadband packages without access to fibre services. The action follows an incident in 2016 in which nearly 2,000 customer routers

Privacy and child advocacy groups in the US, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and the UK are filing complaints with regulators after a study by the Norwegian Consumer Council found critical security flaws and missing privacy protection in children's smartwatches. The watches

In 2016, researchers at the University of Birmingham and the German engineering firm Kasper & Oswald discovered two vulnerabilities in the keyless entry systems affecting practically every car Volkswagen Group had sold since 1995, estimated at 100 million vehicles. Two separate attacks use cheap

At the 2016 Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, researchers from the University of Michigan presented the results of tests that showed that industrial vehicles - a 2006 semi-trailer and a 2001 school bus - were subject to the same security flaws as had already been found in domestic cars. Via

In 2016, security expert Ken Munro discovered security bugs in the onboard wifi in Mitsubishi's Outlander hybrid car that could be exploited to turn off the car's alarm. Some aspects of the Outlander can be controlled by a smartphone app that talks to the car via the onboard wifi. Security flaws in

In 2016, Spanish Jose Carlos Norte, the chief technology officer at Telefonica subsidiary EyeOS, used the scanning software Shodan to find thousands of publicly exposed telematics gateway units. TGUs are small radio-enabled devices that are attached to industrial vehicles so their owners can track

In 2016, when security expert Matthew Garrett stayed in a London hotel where the light switches had been replaced by Android tablets, it took him only a few hours to gain access to all of the room's electronics. The steps he followed: plug his laptop into a link in place of one of the tablets; set

In 2015, Chinese authorities banned the 1.6 million members of the country's People's Liberation Army from using smartwatches and other wearable technology in order to prevent security breaches. Army leaders announced the decision after a soldier in the city of Nanjing was reported for trying to use

In 2016, researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada and the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel developed a proof-of-concept attack that allowed them to take control of LED light bulbs from a distance of up to 400 metres by exploiting a flaw in the Zigbee protocol implementation used in the