this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
208 points (97.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43138 readers
1630 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Software development here. Never, ever, connect your appliances to the internet, and check whether appliances you buy have an offline mode as some are now aggressively forcing users to connect in order to use them.
What’s your reasoning for this?
Anything better than using a vlan to separate these types of devices from the rest of the network?
They are programmed as cheaply as possible and manufactures don’t care once you buy a product so it’s just a matter of time before it becomes part of someone’s botnet, using your power and internet to harass some server somewhere.
As the other reply mentions, aside from these devices representing a security vulnerability, there have been numerous cases where the devices themselves got hijacked. In some cases they can even get bricked via updates. There's also a privacy concern with these companies collecting data on how you use the device.
Does this also apply when not using the official app? I recently bought a Phillips bulb (not Hue) and set up Home Assistant for it, along with the Matter bridge. This turned out to also connect it to the Wi-Fi, but I never installed a manufacturer app.
Would blocking internet access via parental controls on the router be enough to mitigate such threats, or is its mere presence in an internet-connected network dangerous?
The itself app isn't typically the issue. It's the remote server that the appliance and the app connect to that's the problem. What happens is that the appliance uses your wifi to talk to the company server, and that server pushes updates to it, does tracking, and so on. As long as the appliance can't connect to the internet there's no danger from it. Typically, the best approach is to avoid configuring the connection in the first place.