One of the greatest threats presented by IoT is decreased privacy. Recently, millions of children’s GPS-enabled smartwatches were reported to be vulnerable to outsiders.
What happened?
UK research group Pen Test Partners released the finding with 47 million vulnerable devices, used by over five million children. “It’s only the tip of the iceberg,” they said.
Type of threat found
The vulnerabilities were present on the smartwatches traded across Turkey, Poland, Mexico, Belgium, Hong Kong, Spain, the Netherlands, and China.
A similar revelation
Last month, researchers with AV-TEST in Germany also claimed to discover personal information of smartwatch users left unencrypted via a publicly accessible web API. It included information including real-time GPS position data sent via childrens’ watch via inserted SIM cards.
“The Chinese children’s watch is anything but a product for the protection of children, but on the contrary a real danger. It offers potential attackers the ability to identify the location of more than 5,000 children and access data from over 10,000 parent accounts,” said Maik Morgenstern, CTO at AV-TEST.
Protection and prevention tip
Publisher