These days, most households have smarthome gadgets. They are designed to make life easy. You plug them in, open an app, and they just work. However, there is a hidden security flaw that appears when your home internet goes down or when your smart home device temporarily loses connection to your Wi‑Fi router for any reason. Recently, I had an internet outage at my home ISP and discovered that all my smart home devices were engaging in risky behavior and expose a security flaw which can be exploited by someone within Wi‑Fi range.
What is this risky behavior?
Smart devices panic when they lose their connection to the internet. They assume the loss of connectivity means the user needs to setup and reconnect the device, which is a flawed assumption to begin with. To make setup easier for the average user, they drop their security barriers completely and broadcast an open, password-less Wi‑Fi network, known as SoftAP (a special access point), into the surrounding area. This behavior is intentional and by design on smart devices from Google and Amazon, but not Apple. That was a surprise to me. Anyone who knows me well knows I dislike the entire Apple ecosystem except for macOS, so it was a pleasant surprise that Apple’s smart devices are more secure.
How to check this behavior?
If you have any Google smart devices in your home such as Google Home, Nest Mini, older Chromecast models, or Amazon devices like Echo or Alexa, you can check this behavior yourself. Turn off the Wi‑Fi router these devices are connected to, wait a few minutes, and then scan for Wi‑Fi access points. You will see open access points appear with names like GoogleHomeXXX.k or NestMini.u, and if you named your devices, they may show up under the names you assigned. For Amazon devices, you might see AMAZON‑xxx or Ring Setup xxx. Google devices usually appear almost instantly, while Amazon devices have a much longer timeout, so you may need to wait, but they will eventually show up. In this specific aspect of the long delay, I would say Amazon devices are safer than Google. See the actual screenshot of this behavior below.
What an attacker can do?
This blog is intended for a general audience, so I will not go into technical details about what an attacker can do. However, I will say that because this exposed access point has no password, anyone sitting in a car outside your house can connect to it. While they may not be able to steal your Wi‑Fi password or spy on your home network, they can still cause harm, such as monitoring your surroundings, hijacking the smart device, recording audio, or querying data.
What you can do to prevent it?
Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to avoid this security loophole other than unplugging all these devices immediately after your internet service goes down or your Wi‑Fi signal becomes unreachable, which is not a practical solution. So, if this behavior concerns you, your only real option is to unplug the device and stop using it.
Stay Informed and Safe Online
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