Let’s start with your home. Your smart
meter—if you don’t have one, you soon
will—can turn off selected appliances,
such as air conditioners, whenever the
power network is close to being overwhelmed.
That’s fine. What’s not so
fine is if a hacker gets into your home’s
smart meter and makes it cut off electricity to security systems. That would certainly simplify a
burglary attempt. A Web-connected security system could
also be hacked directly, with a hacker using a brute-force
attack to guess your password. In fact, a Russian website
may have already done the job. The site, which was recently
shut down, provided links to 73,011 locations with unsecured
security cameras in 256 countries. In an unrelated incident,
a hacker in Cincinnati compromised a baby monitor and used
it to scream at a sleeping infant.