Protecting your Personal Space
Your home is your personal sanctuary. It’s your escape, your happy place. If someone invades your personal space, it’s as though a piece of you has been violated.
Smart home tech aims to prevent people from invading your home, but as a report on CBC’s The Marketplace recently demonstrated, incorrectly secured smart home technology might provide a secondary conduit for outside attackers to gain access to your space. From monitoring unsecured baby monitors and cameras to remotely unlocking your doors; there are a number of ways that an incorrect smart home set-up can decrease the overall security of your home.
We know that this is a real issue — and it’s one that undermines trust in smart home tech. That’s why our mission is to ensure that people who use our products get both an amazing smart home experience and are granted greater protection against security exploits. Here’s how Liv addresses your security:
Recommend Safer Tech
When buying smart home devices, what appears to be a great deal or a comparable product may actually be a security vulnerability. There are many smart home technology products, most unnervingly primarily in the security area of smart home tech, that are not properly secured.
Taking a look at WiFi cameras, for example, there are a number of cameras available on the market that start with a default device username of admin and a blank password. Some of these cameras give the user a false sense of security by requiring username and password authentication for their app. Despite the app and your account being secured, the cameras themselves are left open to attack and interception.
Liv recommends devices that have proper security protocols in place. This is especially true when speaking about mission-critical security smart home tech, such as locks and cameras.
The devices that we recommend with the Liv Device Finder, such as August Lock, have implemented two-factor authentication. This prevents anyone from gaining control of your home by simply stealing your account password. Also, the devices that we recommend will not have the default username and password vulnerabilities that some of the budget smart home companies have.
Preventing Compromise in Multiple Places
Having fourteen apps on your phone to run your home can be annoying, while remembering fourteen usernames and passwords for each of those apps is even more inconvenient. This becomes a security issue when people simply get too frustrated trying to remember different passwords for each app and eventually use the same password across multiple accounts. In addition, a lot of smart home services do not have two-factor authentication, which requires you to verify that the person logging is in fact you, and you have a potential security mess.
Liv helps prevent the compromisation of your devices with one single app, so you only require one password to manage your home.
Tell Phishers to Go Phish
One strategy that is often used to gain access to a home is the classic email attack. This is when a potential intruder sends an email that appears to be from a device manufacturer asking you to sign in to what appears to be your account. This allows the person orchestrating the attack (called a phishing scam) to skim your login information.
Liv protects its users from these potential attacks with its custom link checker. Liv notifies the user of unsecured links in order to prevent users from surrendering their login information to potential hackers.There are times when action is required from you by the smart home device manufacturer, and in this case, we will inform you that the link provided is legitimate. However, if the link check fails, it means that someone was posing as the manufacturer to steal your data. As long as you don’t enter your login information into that site, you are safe from attack.
Liv Comfortably
Liv set out to make smart homes more accessible and better for people. With the risks associated with improperly secured smart home systems, it may be unnerving for some to enter this new frontier of home technology. Through addressing these key concerns that are current vulnerabilities with smart home tech, Liv can help you sleep soundly knowing that your home is not prone to those same vulnerabilities.
