How can you prevent your smart home from a Cyber Attack

With the events happening in the UK over the last few weeks, Cyber Attacks have been in discussion for the first time in a while. Am I naive enough to think cyber attacks do not happen a lot more than we realise? No. I would imagine everyday, there are a large majority of cyber attacks that go unnoticed, or are not successful.

You may be wondering, if I have a smart home, how can I prevent people from accessing the details within. Here are 3 Tips and Tricks to help with that.

Keep Passwords Safe and Change regularly

This has become the normal procedure, so it will be no surprise that his has made it on this list. A lot of larger enterprises (especially when involved in the business realm) force their users to change their passwords at least every 90 days. With our smart homes, we need to try to and follow this template to ensure that our passwords do not become stale, and ensure that people do not have the chance to brute force these passwords before we change them. A good thing to note, is that everytime a password is entered incorrectly, Home Assistant creates a notification telling you this. If you see this happening consistently, I would recommend changing your passwords, just in case.

Settings>People>Users>Selecting The User >Then clicking the Pencil to change Password

Only allow essential users to access from outside the Local Network

One option that Home Assistant Offers, is restricting non-essential users to only accessing the Smart Home System from a Local Network. This means that you are only needing to ensure the Main users can access on external networks. This is extremely easy to do, and you do this by selecting:

Settings>People>Users>Selecting non-main users>Changing the toggle 'Local access only' to on>Save 

For Example, My MQTT user, my NS Panel Pro users are both only accessible on local networks.

Use Certified Devices by Certified Brands

By ensuring the brands you use for your Smart Home are safe, certified and tested ensures that the control of these devices is safe and reliable. For battery powered items, that connect to your zigbee network only, Tuya Products work brilliantly and I have a lot of these in my zigbee network. However, if you want to invest in smart locks or safety critical smart devices (such as fire alarms, carbon monoxide detectors), I would definitely recommend spending the extra money to buy a device which includes the British Standard 'Kitemark' on. The Smart Locks by Yale do consist of the Kitemark for example. Using these, shows they have been tested rigorously and are less vulnerable to cyber attacks.

I hope you found some of these tips useful on how to protect your smart home. There are many other ways to prevent your smart home being vulnerable to Cyber Attacks, but these are 3 easy and effective ways to protect your smart home.