The recent chutzpah around the roll out of the smart watch has hyped the market sentiments and news around smart watches being cool stuff has been spreading like wildfire. A number of tech giants have been rolling out products which aim at tapping a market segment looking for more portability and flexibility. Users enthusiastically accepting these devices enjoying the flexibility and other cool features to show and brag off about do not seem to realize the simple fact that they have added and accepted yet another gadget to the list of hackable devices.
Threats that Smart Watch users need to know
These smart watches come from companies with good brand names, but do not let that assure yourself for a second that the one you have might be the perfect version not susceptible to hackers. If you are a technical guy and think that you understand your smart watch, here’s a few things you might want to check on tech forums and find out if you are watch overcomes these common loopholes. The list pertains to the use of a transport encryption. If your smart watch does have a secure transportation protocol being followed you can be susceptible to poodle attacks. This is due to the use of weak cyphers.
Secondly motion leaks (MOLe) a common way by which a hacker can get to know the keys that you type in and use it for a cyber-attack against you or determine patterns. It also uses built-in sensors such as the one used for motion, health apps etc. and hackers can control the monitoring of your key strokes. This can reveal Banking passwords or health data related to your body and many such privacy concerns have come up which users and companies need to acknowledge alike and determine ways and means of resolving the vulnerabilities.
Thirdly, the authentication mechanism used by your smart watch can also create a significant hole for hackers to breach in. Ideally, after a limited number of attempted logins the smartwatch should lock out the account and use a secure mechanism using which a user should be allowed to log in. There is no denying the fact that we have tremendous amount of personal data that we generate while using a device like a smart watch. This needs to assure you of a two-factor authentication.
Account harvesting is yet another major issue that smart watches need to deal with as most of them use cloud based web interfaces. These interfaces provide an open channel for hackers to meddle with and get access to data and sensitive information.
Different Sensors that can be used to hack into your Smart Watch
Then there are accelerometer sensors used for tracking your physical fitness activities, battery saver sensors which turn on or off based on the power in your battery, location sensors which are used by social media apps you use, motion sensors to keep track of driving details and directions and a number of other such sensors which can generate enormous amount of data for hackers to tap in and use.
It then becomes essential for you not to be a smart phone dumb user but rather know about the settings which govern these sensors and how can you turn them on and off at the right times in order to avoid giving some hacker a chance to know your exact whereabouts using your PIN code or to be able to determine your passwords by keystrokes etc. In short you need to be smarter in using your smart watch and stay out of trouble by not letting your ignorance making you vulnerable to hackers!
