Tag Archives: wearables

Wearable Technology: Youâ€™ll soon be able to project your Smartwatch onto your Wrist

May 31, 2016 007admin Leave a comment

Smart watches and fitness bracelets are joining millions of people on the mission to be healthier and more active. These devices are becoming part of our daily lives, and expanding the functions that we already use on our Smartphones.

According to the consulting firm IDC, in the first quarter of 2016, wearable technology sales have already increased, mostly due to the smart devices that monitor health and exercise. This sales increase has lead to a decrease in cost; the price of these watches, bracelets and other wearables has gone down this year. Now, there is an intelligent accessory for every budget.

With companies like Fitbit, Xiaomi, Garmin, Samsung, and Apple in the lead, this market is said to be one of the most profitable sectors for years to come. In fact, the number of wearable technology users has already doubled in the last two years, according to a study from PwC,

So far, Christmas 2015 has been the biggest expansion period for wearables. But as the sector grows and more options are available on the market, the array of choices could actually hurt the sale of wearables. To add, many users have already become bored of their wearables after using them for only a few months.

We will soon be able to project wearable screens onto human skin

One of the main disadvantages for most wearable technology is the small size of their screens (when they have them), but soon there will be a solution to this problem. There is now technology that allows for wearables to project onto human skin, converting the user’s arm, or any other part of the body, into an extension of the screen. But as always, with new advances in technology there are other limiting factors and in the case of wearables, it is their wavering cyber-security.

Yes, these devices track personal activity data like user movements and heart rhythm, but any personal information that gives cybercriminals insight into our personal lives is interesting data for them to steal. A number of researchers and experts have even warned us of the large number of vulnerabilities that exist in these smart accessories, like the ones in smart watches. This means that if an attacker manages to exploit these devices, there is a large possibility that they could discover a credit card PIN number.

An attacker could use your Smart Watch to find out your credit card PIN number.

Wearables are not as “fit” as we think, in fact, they are weak when it comes to cyber-attacks. Protecting your wearable accessory is just as important as any other device and fortunately, there are specialized security companies, like Panda Security, that will help you protect your wearables and private information that are at risk.

The post Wearable Technology: You’ll soon be able to project your Smartwatch onto your Wrist appeared first on Panda Security Mediacenter.

Avast

In 2016, your home will be a target for hackers

December 29, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Your home and the devices in it will be a viable target for cybercrooks in 2016.

Back in the good ol’ days of the early 2000s until just a few years ago, all we had to be concerned about was security on our desktop computers and laptop. In the intervening years, mobile devices have become so ubiquitous that hackers have turned their sights on them, especially Android devices.

But starting in 2015, everyone began to realize just how close to home cybersecurity really is. Home networks are the new gateway, and 2016 will be the year that vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices combined with weak home router security will lead to personal attacks.

Our internet-connected world will be increasingly difficult to secure

The weak link is your home router

“The security situation with home routers is actually pretty bad,” Ondrej Vlcek, COO of Avast told Fast Company. “Most of the companies do a relatively good job of . . . patching the vulnerabilities, but the problem is that no one updates the firmware in the routers. The user doesn’t at all, and usually the ISP doesn’t either.” He added that we saw the most attacks on routers by far in 2015.

“Right now, attackers are targeting routers en masse,” said Pavel Sramek, an Avast Virus Lab research analyst. “It’s highly probable that they’ll expand their target list to network-attached storage and “smart” TVs as well, since the security aspect of these devices has been almost completely neglected by their manufacturers so far.”

“Many of the companies and engineers don’t really think about security,” says Vlcek. Data, for example, is often transmitted without any encryption, making it easy to steal or fiddle with.

Since this is the time of year to look forward, I asked several of our Avast Virus Lab research analysts about what to expect in 2016 for home networks, wearable devices, and all the gadgets that make up the Internet of Things.

2015 was the biggest year for router attacks

Is it easy for hackers to break into home networks and is there enough motivation at this time to go to the trouble?

As it stands now, home networks are still not the easiest way for cybercrooks to hack into people’s lives, our team of experts agreed. “Not the easiest way, but too easy to be comfortable with,” said Sramek.

“As more and more devices are becoming smarter and connected to the net, through the Internet of Things, cybercrooks will have more chances to get into the personal home network,” said Sramak’s colleague in the Virus Lab, Nikolaos Chrysaidos.

The motivation is already there too.

“For years, (PC) viruses were the ultimate goal for the bad guy. The goal was to get their hands on users’ data, like credit card information, or to create botnet networks to allow them to send out spam or to do DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks,” said Vlcek. In a similar manner, cybercrooks have already started to turn internet-connected home devices into “zombies to collect data.”

“The amount of attacks will rise rapidly in 2016,” said Sramek. “Turning IoT devices into zombies is half of their plan. The other is hijacking the network connections of users with devices that are difficult to attack otherwise, like iPhones.”

How do regular people make their home gateways smarter and more secure?
“As a bare minimum, people need an automated vulnerability scanner on a PC in their network, like Avast’s Home Network Security, to check for the most common issues leading to cyberattacks,” said Sramek.

Since we’re still in early days, can threats for IoT devices be eliminated before it gets out of control?

Just like with PC and mobile security, home users can prevent many attacks by applying safe practices and using existing solutions like Avast’s Home Network Security to understand what the vulnerabilities are.

Jaromir Horejsi adds that in addition to educating users about badly configured and insecure home IoT devices, we could use “more secure web browsers, because Firefox, Chrome, and IE are so easy to hack.” He predicts that cybercrooks will create DDoS malware to infect various IoT devices with weak passwords and it will take a combination of home user’s knowing what they’re up against along with manufacturers and ISPs taking more responsibility for safety to overcome the looming threat.

Do you expect to see an increase in attacks through wearable devices?

“In 2015, we have seen many vulnerabilities in wearables. Those vulnerabilities could be used by attackers to extract stored data and use them in personalized social engineering attacks,” said Chrysaidos.

“Today we are seeing a big shift toward social engineering attacks which are ingenious and sophisticated,” said Vlcek. Social engineering uses techniques to trick people into installing malware or adjusting settings that they don’t fully understand.

The biggest target for 2016 is mobile

Phones and tablets are the data collection points for most wearables and Internet of Things devices, so they are targeted for the data they store or the data that passes through them. Mobile devices – smartphones and tablets – are where people are now, and the bad guys know this.

“Bad guys today realize that most people are moving their computing to mobile,” said Vlcek. “They are catching up by coming up with new techniques that gets the job done even without malware.”

“Phones store a lot of personal information nowadays that can be monetized in underground forums. As valuable data exist in our devices those can be treats, and targets, for the cybercrooks,” said Chrysaidos.

Visit our blog tomorrow to read about the upcoming mobile threats for 2016.

Follow Avast on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ where we keep you updated on cybersecurity news every day.

Avast

The Internet of Things (to be hacked)?

May 28, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Soon, we’ll be living like The Jetsons (image via philosophymatters.org)

By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.
–Eric Schmidt, Google chairman

As a rule of thumb, it’s good to keep in mind that anything and everything that can be connected to the Internet can be hacked. Poorly designed or implemented systems could expose serious vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Now, most of us are fairly familiar with certain gadgets that can be connected to the Internet, such as mobiles devices and/or laptops, smart watches, and cars, but what about the things that are still emerging within the Internet-connected world? Some of these new items include routers, sensors, and everyday gadgets such as alarm clocks, wearables, microwaves, and grills.

When dealing with the devices that we’ve come to know and love, such as our Android phones or iPads, we already encounter a multitude of shortcomings within privacy policies, unintentional data leakages, and the transmission of tracking and personal data in clear text. Taking this a step further, it’s both intriguing and frightening to think about the challenges we will face as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more and more of a reality. In a recent article published by the Guardian, author Marc Goodman paints an evocative picture of a world powered by the IoT:

Because your alarm clock is connected to the internet, it will be able to access and read your calendar. It will know where and when your first appointment of the day is and be able to cross-reference that information against the latest traffic conditions. Light traffic, you get to sleep an extra 10 minutes; heavy traffic, and you might find yourself waking up earlier than you had hoped.

When your alarm does go off, it will gently raise the lights in the house, perhaps turn up the heat or run your bath. The electronic pet door will open to let Fido into the backyard for his morning visit, and the coffeemaker will begin brewing your coffee. You won’t have to ask your kids if they’ve brushed their teeth; the chip in their toothbrush will send a message to your smartphone letting you know the task is done. As you walk out the door, you won’t have to worry about finding your keys; the beacon sensor on the key chain makes them locatable to within two inches. It will be as if the Jetsons era has finally arrived.

So how can we use these space-age technologies to our advantage? Although most software is still in the process of being optimized for wearables and other emerging smart gadgets, there are three main things to be on the lookout for as we move into the IoT’s heyday:

Issues on devices that could result in device loss, poorly programmed apps, or attacks driven by social engineering
Transmission issues caused by low-level encryption on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth that could result in traffic sniffing, man-in-the-middle and redirection attacks
Storage issues in the cloud that could directly result in data breaches

The sure-fire way to defend yourself against these vulnerabilities is to use a VPN when connecting to open, unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Avast SecureLine VPN is available for Windows, Android and iOS.

ESET

How secure is your smartwatch?

April 15, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Last week’s Apple Watch launch has put the spotlight back on the ‘smart’ inter-connected watches that are expected to change how we interact with each other and the internet. But how secure are they?

The post How secure is your smartwatch? appeared first on We Live Security.

AVG

Is our data ready for the wearable health revolution?

April 8, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

This week MEF issued a report on the use of wearable devices in the health sector, both relating to personal consumption and also when recommended or used by health professionals.

According to the report, “the global health and fitness app market is currently worth $4 billion, and is predicted to be worth $26 billion by 2017”. This means that we’re going to hear a lot more about health wearables in the future.

The biggest selling point for wearables is their convenience. They can passively track our activity, pulse and other vital data points that allow us to make health and lifestyle decisions.

Imagine a future where a patient that needs frequent monitoring for diagnosis can go about their daily routine while a wearable tracks and transmits their data back to the doctor for analysis.

This remote diagnosis is potentially an incredibly simple way to provide doctors with the information they need without waiting time, travel time and consultation time.

There have been some very interesting developments in this area over the past year as well, with Google researching contact lenses that measure blood sugar to the use of wearable camera technology used in surgery so a remote surgeon can assist.

MEF’s report also showed that the adoption of wearable technology in health is lower in Western countries and some of the lowest is seen in Germany and France.

I believe that patients in these countries are more aware of data security and privacy risks having seen many data breach stories in the news over the last few years.

Trust and data security are fundamental to the success of mHealth. Wearables are blurring the lines between recreational and medical data.

By law, medical data needs to be encrypted and authenticated (HIPPA in the USA for example) but recreational data as captured by most wearable devices does not.

Moreover, manufacturers of wearable fitness trackers and other activity monitors are not operating in a regulated market and companies could be using this data in ways that we neither agree with nor understand (even though it may be in their policy documents).

If commercial companies are to hold data that we really only expect medical companies to hold then maybe the regulations should apply to them as well.

While it may be boring, I would recommend reading the privacy policy and terms of use of anything collecting what is very personal and sensitive data and making a choice on whether you want to share this data.

AVG

Wearables will evolve beyond screens

March 25, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

A healthy human has multiple biological senses he or she was born with. Sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch are the five traditionally recognized. The ability to detect other stimuli beyond those governed by the traditional senses exists, including temperature, kinesthetic sense, pain and balance.

If I had to explain a human sense, in our digital world, I would describe it as a biological sensor that responds to a specific physical stimuli and transmits the data to brain cells that later interpret them for us and may lead to a response.

Our biological senses respond to physical stimuli, but could we develop a sensor that responds to stimuli created in the digital world?

I believe the answer is simple; yes. For example, I could get a notification delivered directly to my brain when something important is happening, such as my child has not returned from school on time or when my glucose level is high.

The idea isn’t unprecedented. Many animals have unusual biological sensors that to support their surroundings and lifestyle. This however, took millions of years; we could create something in just a few.

Over the last few years, we’ve developed new technologies to help people with different disabilities to gain back their lost senses. Advances include a tiny eye implant that restores sight to the blind and electronic hearing devices that help people with severe hearing loss.

While these technologies are very important for our society and for the people who need them, their main goal is to restore (or provide an alternative to) the damaged/missing sense that respond to a physical stimuli.

How do we create a digital sense?

Digital senses aren’t as far away as you may think. Smartwatches have started to emerge. Although they are still in their first release version people struggle to understand the benefit of them. Is it yet another screen to look at? Does it just save me from having to take my phone out of my pocket? Will it replace some tasks I do on my smartphone? Or is it just another input peripheral to my smartphone? Where is the value to me?

While most of the available applications of a smartwatch are to bring the smartphone notifications to my eyes via a screen on my wrist, there is another – hidden- value in such devices and that is to develop a new sense. I call it the Digital Sense.

A digital sense can respond to digital events, convert them into physical ones and transmit that information to our brain cells in non-invasive methods – for example, with a combination of one or more micro vibrations. The human brain will then interpret them and respond.

In the digital mobile world, smartphones receive data from many sources: the web, email, embedded sensors and cloud services. However, the main method smartphones use to convey all this data to the human brain is via a screen. As a result, we find ourselves spending many hours in front of multiple screens in order to consume data.

Google Glass introduced new possibilities in the way we interact with and respond to our digital world. Some would say that Google Glass failed as it was too intrusive and harmful to real world social experiences.

A sensor would never do this. A sensor should be part of the body and transmit information for the brain cells to process – not to form another obstacle as we saw with Google Glass.

I believe that by taking advantage of wearable technologies and using them to transform digital data into a physical stimulus that our biological sensors can interpret, in a non-invasive way, will be the most valuable application of wearables. I believe it will dramatically increase the adoption of wearable tech as the value proposition can be immediately understood.

Imagine a smartband on your wrist or a smart device on your shirt that will vibrate or move when your glucose level is high or when your family or colleagues urgently need you.

This is not the notification sound, as we know it from our smartphone today. They are intrusive, not necessarily private and not properly secured. It is more advanced than that. It’s a new sense that we wear and transforms our digital data into something our biological sense can transmit to our brain cells in a non-intrusive, secure and private way. This is where wearable technologies will find their home, not as an additional tiny screen.

Recently I experimented and implementation of such new sense on my wrist, and I do not feel like I will let it go any time soon.

AVG

Mobile World Congress In Pictures

March 2, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Sunday

AVG revealed a pair of concept “Invisibility Glasses” at Pepcom the night before Mobile World Congress.

Monday

HTC announced the release of the HTC M9 on the first day of the conference

Smartwatches are present in all shapes and sizes this year

AVG is showcasing how AVG Zen can work across wearable devices

AVG experts are on hand to give visitors details on AVG products.

More to follow!

AVG

AVG Reveals Invisibility Glasses at Pepcom Barcelona

March 1, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

AVG is always looking for ways to help people protect and secure their online identities and this year at Pepcom in Barcelona, we’re excited to reveal a pair of invisibility glasses.

What are invisibility glasses?

Developed by AVG Innovation Labs, the glasses help protect your visual identity in the digital age.

Through a mixture of technology and specialist materials, privacy wearables such as invisibility glasses can make it difficult for cameras or other facial recognition technologies to get a clear view of your identity.

Why would they be useful?

There are a number of reasons why invisibility glasses could be a valuable privacy tool in the future:

The increasing use of smartphone cameras in public places means it’s more likely unsolicited images taken of us may end up online.
Big Data projects such as Google’s StreetView highlight the possibility for our faces and identities to appear in the public domain.
Advancements in facial-recognition technologies, such as Facebook’s DeepFace, could soon give a private corporations power to not only recognize us, but also cross-reference our faces to other data found online.

How do they work?

While the technology behind invisibility glasses is still in the prototype phase, there are generally two different methods of combatting unwanted facial recognition:

Infrared Light

The use of infrared light to break facial detection software was first introduced Isao Echizen of Tokyo Nation Institute of Informatics.

The idea is to place infrared LEDs inserted around the eyes and the nose areas. Since the infrared lights are completely invisible to human eyes, they are only detectable by cameras which are sensitive to the wavelengths of these LEDs. They claim to break face detection when the lights are on.

In this example we show how infrared can be used to avoid Facebook’s facial recognition technology.

One drawback of this approach is that many cellphone camera sensors have an infrared filter strong enough to cut off any wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum.

Retro-reflective Materials
These specialist materials help maintain your privacy at the moment that the image is actually taken.

Image courtesy of 3m

While most surfaces reflect light by diffusing or scattering it in all directions, retro-reflective materials are specially designed to reflect light back at the same angle as it arrived.

If caught in flash photography, retro-reflective materials will send most of the light back to the sensor. This will result in an image that will put the Dynamic Range of the camera sensor to test.

A noticeable drawback of this approach is that it only works with flash photography as otherwise, not enough light will be sent back to distort the camera sensor. Secondly, a camera with higher dynamic range can be used to minimize the darkening of the subject.

When can I get my own invisibility glasses?

At this stage, invisibility glasses, including those we will be displaying at Pepcom are just a proof of concept .

Rather than designing a product for market release, tech experts are investigating how technology can adapt to combat the daily erosion of our privacy in the digital age. Don’t expect to see them for sale any time soon!

Come and see us

If you are visiting Pepcom in Barcelona next week, please come and talk to the AVG team, we’d love to meet you and give you a demonstration of our invisibility glasses!