It gives you an incredible overview of your home and literally everything that happens in it, at any point, with no more than a few taps on your phone’s screen. And yet, many people find the concept of a smart home complicated and confusing and give up on it completely. They miss out on a lot of convenient features, and to make things even worse, they’re missing out on security quite a bit, too. With that in mind, how do you make sure your smart home is actually secure? How difficult is it to secure a smart home? With so many smart connected devices in our home, it’s definitely worth knowing.
Smart Shopping Makes Quite a Difference
The first thing you should worry about when securing your smart home is to buy the right smart home devices. Now, if you’ve already built your smart home and just want to keep it secure, this might not do much, but if you’ll be buying it in the future, it’s a good idea to buy devices from the bigger, more popular brands. Now, to make things clear, this might not mean that those devices will be more secure from the get-go. However, it definitely means that if something does happen, they will be updated and taken care of rather quickly, something budget manufacturers seem to skimp on rather often. Since it’s the security of your home we’re talking about, the investment is well worth it.
Update Your Devices
A critical aspect of home security is to always be up to date on everything that happens. The main prospect of a smart home is the fact that everything is connected to the internet, and that’s also its greatest vulnerability. This is exactly why some people are skeptical and believe a smart home isn’t as secure as it should be. However, if you keep your devices up to date, you’re already on the way towards living in a home that’s as secure as they come. Note that, unlike your smartphone or computer, that will automatically tell you when there’s an update, that might not happen with smart home devices.
This does vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer, but you might need to check things yourself. When you take into consideration that a smart home’s first line of defense is the software onboard the devices, it only makes sense to keep things as current as possible.
Check Their Settings, Too
While we’re talking about your devices, you’ll want to be careful when you’re setting them up, and when you’re changing their settings. Yes, we know that you’ll want to set things up as quickly as possible, but make sure you take your time and don’t rush through things, because those settings include quite a lot of security things to take care of, too. Read everything carefully and pay attention to the details. If a device requires a password to change its settings, don’t use the same one you use for all the other devices. Pick something unique, and make it complex so nobody can just guess it randomly. Never, and we really mean never, leave the manufacturer’s default password. If there’s two-factor authentication available for any of them, enable it and use it. It’s one of the easiest ways to add security to just about any device, even though it’s an extra step when you need to access it.
Keep Your Router Secure
Do you know what all smart home devices have in common, aside from the fact that they are connected to the internet? They all use your router to do that. Therefore, your router is a gateway that connects your smart home and all other devices that need an internet connection, such as your computer and your smartphones. Keeping the router and your home network secure are pretty important steps when it comes to the overall security of your smart home. The basics are fairly simple. Make sure you change the default username and password to your router to ones that only you know, and to add to this, change the wireless network’s default password immediately, too. Check the firmware and see if it needs to be updated. If that’s the case, by all means, update it – and do this regularly. Router manufacturers tend to distribute updates rather quickly when new vulnerabilities appear, and you’ll want to be covered. And last but not least, don’t let devices connect to the internet unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you have Apple TV, you don’t need your TV to have access to the internet too, right?
