How easy is it to hack an IoT Smart Bulb?
The concept of Smart Home has gained increasing popularity since IoT products has emerged to the consumer’s market. However, these Smart Home IoT device doesn’t come cheap and has some serious security issue that we are gonna discuss here.
Take Smart Bulb as an example. Lightbulbs are essential part of a Smart Home, as it not only controls the power of the light, but also, very often, come with adjustable brightness, RGB color, and can be paired with some voice assistant to issue those command verbally. A normal 60W lightbulb only cost you $0.87, yet a Smart Bulb can easily cost you from $10 to $50 on Amazon,
$15 Smart Bulb
$0.87 normal bulb
The smart bulb from above clearly make a lot more money for its manufacturer than the normal bulb, but is it really worth that much if you know it can be hacked very easily?
Hacking Smart Bulb
Watch this video to see just how easy it is to hack a ESP8266-based Smart Bulb that you can buy from Amazon.
Conclusion
It’s true that hacking these smart device can still be quite challenging to the outsiders, but any engineering students with a little idea of electronics and basic knowledge of programming can replicate what is done in the video, so this definitely makes these smart devices far from safe.