Kiran was a nice woman, if a little earnest, sitting at a table sipping green tea when I got there, but easily identifiable as an academic. Normal people don’t wear cords. They think about it, perhaps even try some on in the near permanent half-price sale at Gap. But ultimately they realise that they cling to you, collect fluff like no other fabric on earth and worse still, they make you look like an academic. After some small talk, she was happy to get down to the topic in hand, and gave me a ton of helpful information on whether it was possible to use this technology to hurt someone. Kiran thought there was one obvious way she could see a hacker using these smart home devices maliciously. If you could obtain access to the owner’s hub, then all bets were off.
The hub, she patiently told me once I’d asked her to go back and explain it again, was the brain box running all the gadgets in a smart home. It sends out commands and they obey. The hub can instruct the thermostat to increase the temperature in a home, or tell the TV to update the channels. Once a device is marked as ‘trusted’ by the hub, it’s in the network and can converse with all the other gadgets.
Some of these smart devices run on end to end encryption. ‘Amazon is generally pretty good with cloud security, but I wouldn’t touch Ergos devices with a bargepole,’ she said, sliding a finger across her neck. A lot of them didn’t though, given that the companies are smaller and the resources limited. There were easy ways to get access to the hub, Kiran told me – if you can obtain the serial number from the owner, then it’s a piece of cake.
‘I see people post it online all the time,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Even if it’s not handed to you on a plate, there are ways of getting it by force if you’ve got basic hacking skills.’
Once a hacker gains control of the smart hub and the devices connected to it, the smart home can become a weapon for the person in charge.
‘You could use the homeowner’s cameras to spy on them,’ she said, ‘or gaslight someone by turning on music at certain times of day, opening doors, closing blinds.’ I suppressed a smile, she wasn’t to know how wonderful her hypothesis was. ‘But mostly, we’re not at that stage yet. Most people buy an Alexa or a Google device and use it to order milk. Sure, those devices are hackable, but the real danger is when everything in your house is connected, and we’re not there yet. That technology is still in its infancy, the preserve of the very rich.’
I asked her who was doing this kind of hacking and she looked around the café quickly, as though we might be surrounded by people eager to know where to start. In actual fact, we were sitting between an elderly woman in a floral coat eating blueberry cake on one side, a Japanese couple who were busy taking selfies on the other, and a young guy with dark hair and a well-cut coat engrossed in a book sitting three tables in front of us.
‘The big stuff is done by nation states – China, Russia, the US – though they deny it. Second-tier hacking tends to be groups focused on extortion – using webcams to blackmail LGBT people in the Middle East, for example. Then you’ve got isolated teens in their bedrooms who are totally self-taught and do it for laughs, because they’re bored, who knows? They have time to mess with someone’s head by interfering with their doorbell or turning off their heating, and then boast about it on Reddit or 4Chan or Babel …’
After a few more questions and a promise to get in touch when the article was done, I made my exit, careful to avoid the couple still determined to get that perfect selfie, and headed back to work. I walked briskly through the back streets behind Oxford Street, mulling over whether I could risk recruiting an accomplice to help me hack Janine’s house or not. I’d been loath to outsource any part of my plan from the outset, unwilling to add any obvious tripwires when there would be so many already. But I was sure that I couldn’t do it alone – my understanding of technology began and ended when I had to update my phone software – and I was already completely enamoured with the idea of Janine’s own home turning on her. Could I find someone I trusted enough to help me do it?
*
That weekend, I spent twenty-eight hours online, rubbing at my eyes every five minutes and alternating between coffee and wine depending on my energy levels. I looked at the sites Kiran had mentioned, reading thousands of posts by amateur hackers who boasted of their successes, crowing about infiltrating clouds, hubs, phones, and cameras in language that was almost completely alien to me. Was it lazy to imagine they were all scrawny 16-year-olds who’d not seen daylight for weeks? Perhaps, but I have no doubt it was accurate nonetheless. There were many posts from people asking hackers to help them, mainly to spy on partners suspected of cheating. ‘Girl （22） needs help to prove BF （28） is carrying on with co-worker. Help!’ was typical of such a plea. Normally the replies offered to take the conversation private, so I didn’t get to see what the result was, and whether a helpful hacker stepped up to the job.