Avast Blog_Security News: How secure is your smart home network?

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See how your smart devices and personal Wi-Fi are vulnerable to hacks. Learn 3 easy ways to secure your home network.

In the past decade, our home computing environments have multiplied in complexity. While in the past, you might just have a laptop and a Wi-Fi router, today the number of devices on the typical network has exploded. Phones, tablets, baby monitors, video streaming devices, security cameras, smart televisions, smart speakers, and smart light bulbs are all common features of a modern smart home.

And while the rise of the smart home has given us access to new capabilities that were unimaginable in the past, it has also presented a considerable security challenge—hackers now have many possible entry points to gain access to your network and data. If each device you own has a small chance of being hacked, the cumulative probability that you’ll eventually be hacked rises with each device you own.

At Avast, we are able to analyze Wi-Fi networks for vulnerabilities using our product Avast Wi-Fi Inspector. With our users’ permission, we analyzed 16 million household Wi-Fi networks around the world to see how common smart device vulnerability was and which countries have the highest (and lowest) rates of security vulnerabilities at home. For the purpose of a global smart home report, we focused on 21 countries in North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region (data is from September 2018).

We found that globally, 40.8% of homes have at least one vulnerable smart device on their network. Out of the countries we took a closer look at, the country with the highest rate of security vulnerabilities is India, where 52.4% of homes have a vulnerable device on their network. The country with the safest home networks is Germany, where the vulnerability rate is 16.7%. Of the smart devices we examined, Network-Attached Storage devices (smart hard-drives) have the highest vulnerability rate (34.1%) and gaming consoles have the lowest (0.1%).

Before diving into the results, it’s worth spending a moment on the data set and methodology. The results are from 16 million anonymized households in 21 countries that provided consent to have their home networks analyzed for device vulnerabilities. In this article, we focus on smart device vulnerability, so we are excluding computers, smart phones, and routers in order to focus on emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

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