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Topics: News, Technology, Crime, World News
Kit Roberts
The FBI has explained three things on your smart which may mean that someone has hacked it.
Despite the movies depicting fast-talking hackers using code to breakthrough firewalls, the reality can actually be a lot more mundane.
Scams like phishing are a way to get someone's personal information, and then use it for whatever criminal purposes that might be.
But while many of us are understandably vigilant when it comes to devices like our phones, laptops, and tablets, there are other common household devices which could provide an opening for hackers.
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This is smart devices - so smart TVs, fridges, thermostats, children's toys, or anything that connects to your Wi-Fi network.
The FBI wrote in a bulletin: "Cyber actors actively search for and compromise vulnerable Internet of Things (IoT) devices for use as proxies or intermediaries for Internet requests to route malicious traffic for cyber-attacks and computer network exploitation."
Hackers can then use these as proxies to make it look like illegal activity is coming from your house - but how can you tell if one of your home devices has been targeted?
If someone is piggybacking off your network then you may notice that the amount of data that you consume suddenly goes up by a lot.
A malware infection on a smart device suddenly increases the traffic going through it, for example through churning out spam emails or attacking websites.
By using your IP address hackers can conceal their identity and location.
If you notice that one device in particular has suddenly had a leap in the data that it's using, then you may need to do something.
But how do you notice this? Well, that brings us to the next sign.
You might not realize that your data usage has gone up, because if you're just using the internet as normal then why would you, but your service provider probably will notice.
This may result in them charging you an additional tariff.
If they get in touch to tell you your usage has increased when you haven't been doing anything new or unusual, then that could be a sign that you're not the only one using your network.
This isn't the only sign either.
Larger volumes of traffic also mean that you might notice things beginning to lag.
While this might be your speed isn't great, or you're running a lot of devices or quite data-heavy things, for example online gaming, if it comes out of nowhere then it may also be become of something else.
With all of these, you may have noticed that a sudden change is the key thing - whether it's your internet bill going up or things suddenly not running like they should seemingly for no reason.