Smart Fridges/Smart Home Products

In January 2014, a researcher at security vendor Proofpoint who was analyzing spam and other e-mail borne threats discovered at least one Internet-connected refrigerator being used to relay spam.

The incident was the first to offer proof of what analysts have for some time been stressing: the startling vulnerability of many network-enabled devices being installed in homes these days such as smart fridges, TVs, digital assistants, and smart heating and lighting systems.

"Refrigerators, personal assistants, and TVs have enough processing power to be used in botnets or to be used as access points to the rest of the network," says Lamar Bailey, senior director of security research and development at Tripwire, which has broken into many such devices in proof-of-concept attacks.

Such devices pose a threat in the enterprise context as well, says Pedro Abreu, chief of strategy at ForeScout Technologies. For example, a connected fridge in an office break room could provide an unexpected gateway to systems containing corporate data.

"This isn’t about hacking the fridge, it's about hacking through it to gain network access," Abreu says. "Since the connected fridge is on the corporate network, which also connects to enterprise apps, it can be leveraged and exploited by hackers to gain valuable corporate and customer data," he says.

“We are most concerned with the ‘unusual suspects’ – those devices that seemingly pose no security risk on the surface, but when you look closely, are dangerously vulnerable.”

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