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Home Hacked Home

Okay. Let's talk about homes, right. It used to be that computers were these big gray boxes under our desks at work. Today computers are everywhere. And there's lots of things. For example, cameras. Cameras are amongst the most common computing devices. You don't think of a camera as a computer, but a camera has got a computer chip in it. And it's got software in it. And like all computers, cameras can be hacked. And they're everywhere. In CCTVs. They're in stores, restaurants, hospitals, ATMs, restaurants, bars, right. And they're all hackable. And there's lots of examples of it. Here's one that just broke a few weeks ago. It turns out that 70 percent of the CCTV police cameras run by the Washington Metropolitan police were hacked just last year, seven days before the election. So we have the election of a new President, a huge security event going on in Washington D.C, and hackers from Romania went ahead and compromised the police camera network. If they can do that, what are your ch...

ances of defending against this? Right? You need a better plan. We have security cameras outside our homes. We have them inside our homes. Many of you have these on your laptops, right? These cameras can be remotely activated. And the trick, by the way, that people don't understand is hackers will also disable the little green or red light. So when you turn on your camera, you'll see that light, but hackers can disable it and you can be recording in the background, which is what happened to Miss Teen America. There was no light on her laptop when she was filmed surreptitiously. So that can happen. And of course, we can turn on the cameras on your cell phones. And what is amazing is there are dozens and dozens of websites that are dedicated just to streaming live in secure cameras. Here was one website that had 73,000 different cameras all over the world that were streaming live. Now one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they buy their camera. The camera comes with the default password, whatever the camera is. That default password is written in the camera's operating manual. That operating manual is free on the camera manufacturer site. If you go ahead and download the pdf, you now see the default password for hundreds of thousands of cameras for each manufacturer. Most people don't change them, which means that it's possible to go ahead and break into people's homes and see them sitting on their couches via their cameras. Seeing, you know, interacting with their children. Doctor's offices. Dry cleaners. All of this is now streaming online. And the security system that you have purchased to protect you can actually be used against you. Here's an example from, I believe it was Victoria in Australia. There is a company called the Crown Casino. It's a big gambling joint down there. And there was a guy that walked into the Crown Casino in Australia and he played a little black jack, or poker. And when he was playing against the house, he did really well. In two days, he walked away with 33 million Australian dollars, which is a big chunk of change. And so two days winning 33 million bucks at poker. That's pretty good. He ended up leaving. And this casino got suspicious 'cuz they had never heard of this guy. They ended up doing an investigation and what they found is that the casino's own security network had been hacked and compromised. The guy was wearing a microphone in his ear or sorry an earpiece. So his friends who hacked the casino's own security network were able to use the cameras over the poker table to tell him what the dealer and other players had in their hands. So the tools that we are buying to protect us can very much be turned against us. And if a $33 million hack doesn't grab your attention, many people have these types of cameras in their home, right? Any of you ever use one of these for your kids? Yeah, so a nanny cam. We all use them, but they can be hacked. And they're hacked for all types of strange reasons. Here's a family I believe in Ohio. They were fast asleep. It was three o'clock in the morning and all of a sudden they heard an intruder in their house screaming, Jessica Jessica wake up. And they used a whole bunch of profanity after that. The father woke up in the middle of the night. He's like, what's going on? He had his one year old daughter Jessica lying in the crib and as soon as he ran in there, he heard somebody scream at him through the baby camera. When he turned into the room, the camera turned and followed him at three o'clock in the morning in his daughter's own room. He freaked out, did the right thing, ran and pulled the plug. The wife ran in. And it turns out that the hacker broke into the baby's camera and was able to see everything that was going on there. He knew her name was Jessica because it was written over her crib in the baby's room. Okay? So again, the tools that we use to protect ourselves can be used against us. And I won't bore you with the details, but there's a large number of websites out there on the dark web dedicated to women breastfeeding and the video feeds all come from these types of hacked cameras. So it's entirely possible. Finally, I'm going to tell you now about the story of Cassidy Wolf. Cassidy Wolf was Miss Teen America. 16 year old girl. Obviously very beautiful in high school. One day she's sitting at her laptop and she gets an inbound email and the inbound email says, I know what you've been doing. I've been watching you. And unless you have sex with me, I'm going to share all of this information with everyone you know including all the kids at school. And that information, as Cassidy Wolf read down her email, was a series of naked pictures of her inside her own bedroom. What she didn't realize and nobody would is, she happened to have her laptop in her 16 year old girl's bedroom and when she came out of the shower and was changing, like anybody else, you know we all get naked, the camera was remotely activated. The little green light was on. And all of this was filmed. And if she didn't have sex with the person who was extorting her, this is called sextortion, then all the images were going to be released. So many, so many, so many people succumb to this type of sextortion and give in. Which of course, is further victimization. But in Cassidy Wolf's case, to her credit, she told her mom who then called the FBI. They did an investigation. It took nearly a year. And they uncovered the perpetrator of this attack was one of her classmates, okay, who had purposefully infected her. That classmate had no particular technological skill, but he was able to go on the dark web and buy one of these automated tools that had sent her a message that she clicked on and infected her machine. Okay. So again, it's not about identity theft only. It's not about credit card theft. This can be part of extortion. Sextortion, right? This could happen to your daughter or your son. So keep that in mind. Now, how could she have prevented this? It is preventable. There's a very highly piece of advanced technology that would've made all of this not happen. And you should get one. And put it over your cameras. If you don't like this, there's another piece of technology you can use or something very very fancy like this. And put them over all of your cameras unless you need to see what's going on there or turn them down. A year or two ago when my book Future Crimes came out, I made up these cam patches that I gave away to people. But you can also get versions of this on Amazon. And you should put them on all of your devices with cameras that you don't actively need operating. And one that people often forget about is smart TVs. Increasingly, smart TVs have cameras built in so you can Skype and do video chat. I cover those up all the time. Now, it's not just cameras that are in your home. There's lots of other internet enabled devices. In particular, we are entering the age of the smart home where your thermostat, security camera, lights, stereo system, smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot, Google Home, the Apple Pod, alright, Smart Pod. These are computers and like all computers, they're hackable. And so the number of connected devices in our home is growing and you're gonna see a massive increase in this. Right now it may seem ridiculous to have an internet enabled refrigerator, but Samsung has been selling them probably for six or seven years. Now, everything from your car to your pet is going to be online through what's known as the Internet of Things. And according to Cisco, all of these extra devices are gonna add 50 billion new computers to the network. Again, you don't think of your camera or your television or your refrigerator as a computer, but in fact, they are. And all of these devices are going to be part of the smart home. And I mentioned in my book Future Crimes, "There has never been built a computer system that could not be hacked." Enough time, energy, and effort, it's all hackable. Which means that all of these are hackable. Which means that these are hackable. Consumer Reports just in the past week put out a whole study talking about the number of smart televisions that can be hacked and how they're leaking privacy. And how bad guys can use your television to break into your laptop. Because what they do is they break into the weakest point, right. They go through the weakest chain in your home. And that's how they'll get access to all your other devices. Now previously, I mentioned that there was something you could do to prevent these IOT smart home device type attacks. And I'll mention it again. This time in more depth. I referred you previously to the concept of a hardware firewall. And I mentioned in particular, a next generation smart hardware firewall called the Cujo. Now what's great about the Cujo is it can help protect all of the devices connected to your home network. On your laptop, there's a ton of security settings that we spend a lot of time on with me showing you how to lock them down. You can do that in your phone. When it comes to IOT, Internet of Things, smart devices, they don't have hardly any of those settings. So there's no built in firewall in your smart internet enabled television. There's no security settings that you can push on your refrigerator or your car to lock them down. So instead what you need to do is, since they don't have the security systems built in, you need to go ahead and make sure that anything that is connecting to your home network has those connections blocked from the outside world with a hardware firewall device like the Cujo. And again, you can run it all from an app on your phone, which makes it super easy to use. And it has some really cool features. In particular, one for parental controls. So many parents struggle with how much time their kids are spending on the iPads and the iPods and the, you know, on their cell phones and the like and how much they're surfing even though they always claim it's for homework. Yeah, I'm doing homework. This can actually in a super easy way, both restrict what sites your kids are allowed to visit and how much time they can spend online, which is a really nice feature of this firewall. Cujo has been used in 25 million households. That on average, protects 15 devices per household. And it blocks on average 50 unique threats for each user. So really really useful. It's been recommended by all these people and has won a bunch of different awards and the reason mostly why I'm suggesting you consider it is because it's easy to use. And if something's hard to use, you won't use it. And if it's easy to use, you will.