The Car Industry

Especially all hacked cars made it into the latest newsflashes from online news media to the biggest media broadcasters in the world. Some examples were the Fiat Chrysler where 1.4 million cars were called back after the vendors Jeep hack and a Corvette where the brakes of the car could be remotely controlled. These examples confirmed the problems related to the whole car industry described in our former blog (e.g. The BMW problems).

The Fitness Industry

Completely different but fully related to the Internet of Things are the new wristbands, step counters or mobile fitness devices and the data they gather in-the-cloud and on the device and your smartphone. Interesting was the test performed by AV-Test, a worldwide well known independent test organization for security products. This test tried to measure how the private fitness data is transferred from the devices to the smartphones or the cloud and how secure the apps of fitness trackers are. You can find the full test here. These new fitness wristbands are very popular and it is already a trend; all activity results are recorded and analyzed in an app on the user’s smartphone. This means it is possible to immediately see how well the user performed. The question remains, however, is the data transported securely from the wristband to the user’s smartphone? Or is it possible for someone to intercept this link, copying or even manipulating the data? Or could the app itself be manipulated? Those questions were investigated, where 9 fitness wristbands or trackers together with the corresponding Android apps were monitored in live operation. How well performed those trackers in terms of security? And what about eavesdropping? (more…)