![]() ![]() Once, VTO Labs examined a circuit board from an ocean buoy in an effort to find out whether it contained any data about the shipping movements of drug traffickers. Many of these sorts of devices access and store similar types of data.ĭevices don’t even have to be particularly sophisticated to prove helpful in criminal investigations, according to Watson and Epifani.īoth of them have both worked on devices more discreet than smart fridges. ![]() Samsung didn’t reply to our request for comment, but it’s following pretty standard practices within the world of IoT. None of this is necessarily secret or undisclosed to people when they buy this model of refrigerator, but I certainly wouldn’t have expected that if I were under investigation, a police officer-with a warrant, of course-could see my hungry face each time I opened my fridge hunting for cheese. What’s more, he found that the fridge could hold much more data if a user connected the fridge to other Samsung devices through a centralized personal or shared family account. Epifani could even access photos of the Diet Coke and Snapple on the fridge’s shelves, thanks to the small camera that’s embedded inside it. The fridge stored data about when a user was playing music through an iHeartRadio app. Epifani found information about Bluetooth devices near the fridge, Samsung user account details like email addresses and home Wi-Fi networks, temperature and geolocation data, and hourly statistics on energy usage. What he found was a treasure trove of personal details. Once they’d done that, Epifani got to work analyzing and organizing the data and gaining access to the files. Steve Watson, the lab’s CEO, explained that this involves finding all the places where the fridge could store data, both within the unit itself and outside it, in apps or cloud storage. VTO Labs reverse-engineered the data storage system of a Samsung fridge after it had primed the appliance with test data, extracted that data, and posted a copy of its databases publicly on their website for use by researchers. Epifani used data from VTO Labs, a digital forensics lab in the US, to investigate just how much information a smart fridge keeps about its owners. Take, for example, a Samsung refrigerator.
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