Dangers of Smart Technology

Ori Gall-Kochavy

CS – 116

Dangers of Smart Technology

Technology is all around us in our daily lives, from our homes to our cars, even some utensils such as cooking devices. In this age all of our technology is getting smarter, allowing us to own thing that were once thought of as science fiction, which is great and all, but with technology taking over our everyday lives, it opens us to much security flaws, which in our current state of technology could be extremely damaging, and overall dangerous.

The devices that we see in our daily lives have gone from our phones to our cars and now even our homes and watches are all “smart” and connected to the internet. On one hand no pun intended this advancement is great and overall a huge step into the future, but on the other hand it also opens us up to cyber-attacks.

Our technology today is everywhere, the most used and is the one that people tend to think of as “smart” technology are our phones. Today we have more information on our phones than on any other form of technology that we own, and the sad part of it and that most people do not have any idea of how to secure themselves. Based on a 2014 Annual State of the Net Survey by Consumer Reports National Research Center, 34% of people took absolutely no security measures to protect their phones. 36% Set a lock that is longer than 4 digits, 29% make a backup of their data, 22% installed software to locate their phone if lost or stolen, only 14% installed an antivirus app. Our smart phones are greatly open to attacks. For example a form of attack is a malicious or fake app; most of these apps are made for android, due to android allowing third party apps to be installed and also that anyone can make an android app and have it uploaded onto the Google Play store. Based on a research done by Sophos, in 2011 Google removed over 100 malicious apps from the Play Store, before they were able to remove a single application 260,000 downloads of only one app...