Pet Tracker Flaws Expose Pets and Their Owners to Cybercrime

In a future where everything is connected, cybercriminals may not need to target you to steal your personal data. They can hack your pets instead. 

Kaspersky Lab researchers today published the results of a study investigating vulnerabilities in popular pet trackers, which transfer GPS coordinates from pets to owners for safety and location monitoring. The flaws they discovered could let an attacker hack these devices, identify and replace the coordinates of a pet and its owner, and access owners' data.

In studying several brands of pet trackers, researchers found: Bluetooth capabilities that don't require authentication, authorization tokens and coordinates that can be stored sans encryption, trackers that don’t check server certificates for HTTPS connections, and trackers and apps that allow the installation of false firmware and transmit the name, email, and coordinates of the pet's owner.

It's another reason to worry about the implications of poor IoT security. If a hacker can intercept these coordinates, they can identify where a pet or owner is at any given time, learn their daily routines, and over time develop a pattern of owners' and animals' habits.

Read more details here.