More and more households are using smart home devices, but only few consumers use appropriate cyber protection mechanisms for such devices. This can give easy access to burglars to building plans from robot vacuum cleaners and for fraudsters to recordings from surveillance cameras, which could allow them to impersonate the victim’s contact persons. The Cybersecurity Monitor of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the Federal and State Police Crime Prevention Program (ProPK) annually examines the security situation in German households that use the internet. This issue focuses on the protection of smart home devices.
In the survey, 3,047 people aged 16 and over were questioned nationwide. The results were weighted according to age, gender, geography and education in Germany in order to adapt them to the population structure.
The core results are:
- 75 percent of people in Germany now use smart home devices in their everyday lives.
- Less than half of those surveyed (42%) are aware that smart home devices can also be infected by malware.
- Only 37% of users are aware that unauthorized persons could spy on people via smart home devices. Even fewer, namely 35%, are aware of the risk that their data could be intercepted and misused.
- Only 34% of smart speaker users have set up a strong password for their user account.
- Even fewer smart home users make sure they only enter the data that is strictly necessary (29%), install regular updates (27%) or check the security of their router (19%).
- Alarmingly, 16% of respondents have not yet taken any of the 17 recommended protective measures for their smart home devices.
Although one in ten people in the Cybersecurity Monitor stated that they had been affected by cybercrime in the last year, the IT security of smart home devices still falls by the wayside for most consumers.
Source: Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)
Further information in the Cybersecurity Monitor.