I first became aware of the term “Zombie product” at an IoT seminar I attended last year. It describes perfectly what has happened to my Samsung Smart refrigerator. I purchased it back in 2011 when it first came out. I was so excited about the potential of a “smart refrigerator” from which I could maybe someday tweet, send email, or have the fridge track when I’m short on milk, eggs, creamer and automagically order it for me. I knew it couldn’t do all that out of the box but my expectations were that increasing functionality would be released over time. Fast forward 4 short years later and my smart fridge is still pretty stupid. The last update was in 2012 and it’s now a Zombie. I can’t log into my twitter feed at all to even read it. I think I heard Picasa is going away and tracking the stuff in my fridge is a manual process only where I can drag and drop icons in a picture of the fridge but that’s it. There’s no support for it to speak of and no updates. It’s a Zombie device that still looks cool in my kitchen and we paid a premium amount of money to possess. So, when I heard about Zombie devices that’s when I realized that there are likely millions of homes and businesses littered with these devices. From a security perspective, they aren’t just Zombies, they are the weak link into your home network. I support the idea of having a “Minimal Functional Product” but I would argue that it needs to be secure as well and not JUST functional…..maybe “Minimally Secure and Functional Product” is better.