How to Keep Your Smart Home Safe

The concept of smart homes has become quite popular among consumers, especially due to their convenience. A smart home is equipped with several devices that are connected to the internet or intranet (internal network), to allow users remote management of different household appliances or systems.

The rapid growth of smart homes can also open up new opportunities for perpetrators to practice acts of cybercrime. Appliances in a smart home are all connected in a network. Any breach in that network can allow cybercriminals access to your home appliances, which can jeopardize your privacy or even potentially threaten your life.

Make sure you are following these steps to prevent hackers from gaining access to the network that connects to your smart home.

1) Use protected devices and appliances only

Different appliances or devices like thermostats, lighting systems and CCTV systems present in your smart home are part of a network. As a consumer, you need to make sure that each of these devices has been designed to meet certain security and safety standards. While purchasing smart devices you can ensure that they meet standards like ZigBee, Z-Wave or S2 (Security 2). Most well established brands follow these secured transmission protocols. Buying cheaper devices may save you money, but it can also expose you to cyber threats, as these devices lack the proper security protocols.

2) Never access your smart home network from a public or open Wi-Fi

One of the key features of smart home systems is that they allow you to remotely control or manage your home appliances. Since you are connecting to your home automation network over the internet, you need to avoid using any open or public Wi-Fi. These networks can have very poor security protocols and give hackers the opportunity to sneak into your home network. Methods like man in the middle (MITM) (man in the middle) enable hackers to set up fake public Wi-Fi that allows them to intercept any transmission that takes place. They may be able to see the type of data that you are sending to or receiving from your smart home.

3) Keep your smartphone secured

In a home automation system, your smartphone acts as a universal remote control; ensure that it is always locked by a passcode, touchID or facial recognition. In case your smartphone is stolen, immediately try to lock it by remote access – the “Find my iPhone” feature of iOS can be really handy in situations like this. Moreover, if you have reason to believe the security of your smartphone has been compromised, or even if you have recovered your phone after it had gone missing, reset the password of your smart home network. It is also advisable that, in such situations, after retrieving your phone you restore to factory settings.

4) Smart homes need smart password management

In a typical smart home, the appliances or devices are connected to the network via a Wi-Fi router or hub; therefore, protecting Wi-Fi is crucial. Set a strong password for your Wi-Fi network that is at least 12 characters long – and make it unique from any of your other passwords. Name your Wi-Fi network in a way that doesn’t let people know it’s your house; naming it “John’s Home,” for example, makes you an open target.

Before committing to the luxury and convenience of your smart home, you need to understand how the whole system works and how you can protect yourself from data theft and security breach. These four steps, if implemented correctly, should help you to stay safer and more secure.

Facebook Collected Your Android Call History and SMS Data For Years

Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android devices for years. Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file. A number of Facebook users have been spooked by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some.

“Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year,” says ‏Twitter user Mat Johnson. Another, Dylan McKay, says “somehow it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum.” Others have found a similar pattern where it appears close contacts, like family members, are the only ones tracked in Facebook’s call records.

Facebook has been requesting access to contacts, SMS data, and call history on Android devices to improve its friend recommendation algorithm and distinguish between business contacts and your true personal friendships. Facebook appears to be gathering this data through its Messenger application, which often prompts Android users to take over as the default SMS client. Facebook has, at least recently, been offering an opt-in prompt that prods users with a big blue button to “continuously upload” contact data, including call and text history. It’s not clear when this prompt started appearing in relation to the historical data gathering, and whether it has simply been opt-in the whole time. Either way, it’s clearly alarmed some who have found call history data stored on Facebook’s servers.

The same call record and SMS data collection has not yet been discovered on iOS devices. While Apple does allow some specialist apps to access this data in limited ways like blocking spam calls or texts, these apps have to be specifically enabled through a process that’s similar to enabling third-party keyboards. The majority of iOS apps cannot access call history or SMS messages, and Facebook’s iOS app is not able to capture this data on an iPhone.

City of Atlanta Hit with Ransomware Attack

Computer systems for the City of Atlanta were hit by an apparent ransomware attack that has caused outages and is now under investigation by the FBI. The cyber criminals are demanding $51,000 to unlock the system, and one security expert believes the public deserves more answers.

City employees in Atlanta coming to work Friday morning were told not to turn on their computers and WiFi at the Atlanta airport was turned off due to a ransomware attack that hit municipal systems on Thursday.

As employees walked into city hall for work, they were handed a printed notice telling them to not use their computers until they were cleared by the municipal IT group, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

The city is still working on mitigating the ransomware and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms did not answer questions from reporters as to whether the attack had ended. "What we want to make sure of is that we aren’t putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. We want to make sure that we take the appropriate steps," she said. 

The attack hit early Thursday morning. Bottoms has repeatedly told employees they should monitor their bank accounts because city officials don’t yet know what information was compromised in the attack.

How to Make Your iPhone and Mac Work Together Seamlessly

Apple has a definite tendency to get its devices working well with each other before considering such distractions as Android or Windows, and over the years the iPhone and the Mac have built up a strong understanding. You might not appreciate just how many different ways they can seamlessly work together—here’s what you need to know.

Not all of these features have always worked all that well, but as time has gone on, Apple has managed to get them up to a respectable level of intuitiveness and stability. What you need to begin are an iPhone running iOS 11 and a 2012 or later Mac running macOS High Sierra, both signed into the same iCloud account with the same credentials.

Universal Clipboard

The Universal Clipboard is exactly what it sounds like: Copy and paste that works across your iPhone and your Mac. You just use the copy command as you normally would, then pick up again on your other device with the paste command, though Apple warns users that “copied content is available to paste on your other devices only for a short time.”

So, say you’ve got an address up on your MacBook, in an email. Highlight the text, choose Edit and Copy (or hit Cmd+C), and then switch over to your iPhone, in an app like Notes. Tap and hold on the screen to bring up the pop-up menu, choose Paste, and your text should appear.

It works in the other direction too, of course, and with images as well—so you could, for example, paste something that you’ve got in Photos on your iPhone right into a document in Pages, no middle steps required.

iMovie projects

If you’ve started working on a movie masterpiece on your iPhone or your iPad, you can move it over to your Mac to finish it off, as long as you’re using iMovie on both devices—it’s a handy feature, considering you probably shot the footage on your phone or tablet in the first place.

In iMovie for iOS, tap the Projects tab, and choose the project you want to use. Hit the Share button, and you’ve got two options: You can select iCloud Drive (which passes the project via iCloud Drive and keeps a copy there) or wait for your Mac to show up in the AirDrop panel.

In both cases you have the chance to share either the iMovie project as a whole (timelines and elements and all), or the finished movie generated from your assembled clips, which will be exported if you choose this option.

Tether your iPhone

This one’s dependent on the data plan you have with your mobile operator, but if your Mac detects an iPhone with a data signal nearby, it’ll list it in the available wi-fi networks, should you want to connect to it. For those times when you don’t have regular wi-fi available, or it’s too flaky, or you don’t think it’s secure enough, this is simple to use.

From Settings in iOS, choose Personal Hotspot to see your options and the instructions. The wi-fi password for the hotspot is included here too, if you’ve got other devices to connect. Toggle the Personal Hotspot option on to make the connection available.

Click the wi-fi symbol on the menu bar on your Mac, choose the iPhone entry, and the rest happens automatically. If your iPhone was on wi-fi, it gets disabled, so your phone falls back to a cellular connection. Choose Disconnect from iPhone from the wi-fi drop-down to end the tethering. You can also connect via Bluetooth or via a cabled connection.

Make and receive calls from your Mac

Picking up your phone to answer a call is old fashioned nowadays—you can use your Mac instead, as long as both devices are on the same wi-fi network. From Settings on iOS, tap Phone, then Wi-Fi Calling, then turn the Wi-Fi Calling on This Phone toggle switch to on.

Head to your Mac, open FaceTime, and you might get automatically prompted to allow calls from your iPhone. If not, open the FaceTimemenu and choose Preferences. Check the box marked Calls From iPhone.

Making calls from FaceTime on macOS is easy—just enter a name, email address, or phone number into the search box at the top to find the person you want to call. Receiving calls isn’t much more difficult: Whenever someone calls your iPhone, you’ll see Accept and Decline buttons in the corner of your Mac display, so make your choice accordingly.

Send and receive text messages

You can also get busy text messaging on your Mac: That is, sending and receiving standards SMSes, as well as iMessages that sync automatically between Mac and iPhone nowadays. In Settings, tap Messages then Text Message Forwarding and activate your Mac (if the option doesn’t appear, check that you’re signed into iCloud on both devices, with the right phone number registered).

With that done, open up Messages on macOS, and you can compose new texts to any contact and continue threads. Your entire SMS history won’t get synced over, but any texts sent and received after you’ve enabled the feature appear automatically.

Share files easily

Finally, there is AirDrop, the super-simple way of moving files between devices made by Apple. You need to get it set up first: In macOS, open AirDrop in the Finder to set your visibility, and on iOS open up the Control Center and make sure AirDrop is enabled.

With that done, you just need to click or tap the Share button in any app on your macOS machine or your iOS device—your other device should appear, and once you select it, the file gets moved straight over.

You can share maps, websites, text, images, and more, so you might prefer using AirDrop to Handoff in certain situations.

Your Company’s Cybersecurity Begins with Employees

In this climate of record-setting data breaches, it’s far too easy to assume that hackers only go after the “big guys.” While nabbing millions of customers’ records from a major brand-name corporation might be a great payoff for cybercriminals, the reality is smaller businesses are just as likely, if not more likely, to be a target. 

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As a general rule, small companies don’t have the budget for building their own IT departments or investing in the latest cybersecurity protocols. Too often, employees in small companies already wear multiple hats, meaning the ability to hire an in-house cybersecurity professional might be out of reach financially. Finally, the limits on technology and shared access in many small businesses can mean that computers and mobile devices might be more vulnerable to attack, and hackers know it.

Fortunately, the government is at work on developing guidelines that can help protectsmall-to-medium-sized businesses, but in the meantime, there is more that companies can do to build up a frontline of defense. Things like investing in affordable antivirus software and establishing standard protocols that will prevent infections are key, but there’s another solution that can reduce your risk exponentially, and it’s practically free.

All too often, employees are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Whether it’s responding to phishing attempts, turning over sensitive information in spearphishing attacks, downloading viruses or malware to the company network, or any other intentional or accidental behavior, getting your employees on board with prevention can do wonders for mitigating the risk of a breach.

Like many other business tools, employee training can run the spectrum of cost from free to Cadillac pricing, and it will be up to each company to decide what level of training they need. However, establishing some guidelines for computer use and employee tech behavior doesn’t cost you anything:

1. Make sure employees understand the risks associated with downloading content, opening attachments in emails, or clicking on links in messages or on the web.

Many forms of ransomware, for example, infiltrate the network by starting out as a link or attachment. Spread the word routinely about the latest threats and make sure the message reaches all employees, regardless of their role.

2. Robust antivirus software can help protect your network in real-time and prevent malicious software from installing, but it can only catch the threats it knew about when it was installed.

Keeping that software up-to-date and making sure your employees install updates as they appear is important.

3. Knowing how to respond in the face of a data breach or other attack is critical, and it should be automatic among all employees.

Moreover, your company’s policy needs to be specific, but not so dire that employees attempt to cover up a tech mistake out of fear of termination.

Sadly, preventing intentional internal data breaches is important, too. Companies should evaluate not just what information they gather and why they need it, but also make a determination about which employees can access sensitive information. If an employee doesn’t need access to certain data to fulfill their job, steps should be in place that prevents access.