The big data generated by the Internet of Things provides a lot of value in everyday life. One example of this is in my career, as a common burglar. I never used to think of myself as a criminal, but as an application developer for Internet of Things devices I saw so much opportunity—I couldn't help myself.
In my regular “job” I build complimentary apps to the growing number of smart home thermostats that are emerging like the Nest. These apps use the Nest API to extend features and functionality to homeowners who have the smart thermostats installed in their home.
One day after building a dashboard with a comprehensive set of analytics, displaying common home energy use patterns, I noticed a clear pattern—when users were home and when they were not. Users always adjust their home energy consumption to be more efficient when they are not home, and for me it was easy to see the times they weren’t home, and I was able to predict the patterns for 80% of users.
Me and my business partners started going out to some of these houses to test our assumptions, and sure enough..we were right. In some cases we even knew if the neighbors were home, giving us a huge advantage if we were deciding to actually break into a house.
After several months, we decided to go for it, and broke into our first house. It was a piece of cake! Before too long we were doing two a week, and amassed a huge fortune in coins, jewelry and other valuables. We never went for big items, just the small most valuable of possessions.
We tend to stick with higher-end houses that we know would have insurance, and only took things that could be easily replied. We’ve been doing this for 2 years now, and nobody has caught on. The Internet of things is more than just a home convenience, consumers are so blinded by the potential for convenience they don’t even see that these devices make them more vulnerable to criminals like us.
