I’m Paula Santolaya, reporting live from SANTOLIVE in my virtual reality. Have comments, questions, or suggestions? Post them in the comments section or email me at info@santolive.com.

In the near future, having an intelligent home will no longer be expensive and elitist. But the risks to be spied increase because all our things are going to be connected to the Internet and the tools to hack them are increasingly effective.

According to Gil Shwed, founder of one of the most important Israeli cybersecurity companies in the world, Check Point, there are about sixteen different ways to attack a device and twenty technological tools to do it. These phenomenon is known as the Gen V Attack or the fifth generation cyber attack: large-scale cyber-attacks on critical financial infrastructure designed to infect networks, virtual machines, clouds…

Recently, a hacker was able to extract private data from an user including the WiFi network password, through one of his smart bulbs. The police investigation showed that the chip of the bulb contained the WiFi credentials without any type of encryption or security layer.

The information stored by these smart devices allows cybercriminals to know where exactly the tenants are in the house, when it is empty and even take control of all home appliances, computers, tablets and mobile phones. Precisely, researchers from the University of Princeton (New Jersey) have developed IoT Inspector, an application that alerts users if a stranger connects to one of their WiFi network.

We must be prepared to face these new problems, first with the necessary information about the systems that integrate all these new technologies and, secondly, with a complete training to improve our cybersecurity. Protecting ourselves from cyber attacks is not an impossible task. If Edison woke up…