Once again, the rosy assumptions about the “Internet of Things” come back to bite people.
Rather surprisingly, the locks did come with regular keys as a emergency backup. It’s a mighty good thing for the people affected.
If you’re on Twitter, Internet of Shit has a litany of these stories.
As far as I can determine, anyone who buys something that has remote access as a possibility is asking to get screwed.
Wife and I have one of those Ring camera doorbells, which is internet-accessible. Handy from time to time, although most of the clips it captures are bugs crawling across the lens, and birds or frogs pursuing said bugs. If it dies or gets hacked, I’m not going feel violated; I can live with a stranger seeing our front porch over the internet. But I don’t see us ever getting an internet-accessible camera that monitors the inside of our house, or an internet-accessible door lock.
IoT devices are also how the huge Denial of Service attacks are done nowadays. They tend to have very little security, so it’s easy to take them over and have them attack a server.
The same security problems are why I don’t use 'em. I actually paid more to get one of those old fashioned FM transmitters to help find my keys rather than one of those cheap IoT devices that could tell me where they are. I’d rather hear the beeping and follow it.