Takeaway: Thanks to the advance of IoT, the market for wearables keeps expanding to the point that it should hit 50 billion devices by 2020. While these devices offer hands-free convenience for specific functions, they also introduce new points of vulnerability that can be opportunities for hackers.
Cisco predicted that by the year 2020, 50 billion new wearable devices will be connected through the IoT. This increases points of connection exponentially, and that translates into a huge opportunity for hackers.
Demonstrated Hacks
That wearable devices like Fitbits can be be manipulated through acoustic interference was demonstrated by a number of research experiments. It’s true that there are no immediate ramifications of a nefarious nature other than possibly gaming the count of one’s steps, but the researchers do warn of this: “For instance, should one trust the step count from a Fitbit as evidence for an alibi?” How can it be relied upon if it’s possible to inflate the number of steps through a hack?
This is a question of reliable accuracy, but sometimes it is the accuracy itself that poses a problem. Wearables might be picking up accurate information that is traced directly to the individual and so reveal quite a lot.
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