California digital assistants began trying to buy toys after a TV report on Amazon Echo

Fear of gadget danayans, gifts bringing

Virtual Assistants is becoming more and more. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, not to mention the recent invention of Japanese developers, help people live and work. Digital assistants are able to suggest the right path in a given direction, they can find nearby restaurants and gas stations, they even help shoppers. In the latter case, virtual assistants sometimes exhibit even excessive zeal.

Among those who have distinguished themselves recently is the Alexa system, the connection with which, in particular, is carried out through the Amazon Echo smart column. This audio system appeared quite a long time ago, and since then it has been loved by many, especially in the USA.

“She is my right hand. For example, when I cook, choosing a new dish, it helps me, ”said Meyali Sanchez, one of the users of Amazon Echo. “She” is Alexa's digital assistant, able to adapt to the habits and voice of a person. The system is able to manage music and video library files on the network. Alexa wakes up the user in the morning, controls the thermostat, turns off or, on the contrary, turns on the lighting system at a specified time. If the owner is busy and cannot go to the store himself, he gives instructions to Alexa and she acquires the necessary thing or service on her own. There would be money on the card - and the system will solve the rest.
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True, the work of the system raises questions from cybersecurity experts. It is convenient, but its protection leaves much to be desired. Actually, this applies not only to Alexa or Amazon Echo, but also to other gadgets and services from the world of the “Internet of things”. Taking advantage of the fact that developers pay more attention to the design and functionality of their developments than to their security, cybercriminals can, for example, create botnets from IoT devices (this has been repeatedly published on Habrahabr and Geektimes).

The problem, in particular, is that many digital helpers cannot distinguish their owner from a stranger. Yes, they are trying to adapt to "their" user, but under certain circumstances, incidents can happen. “These devices do not recognize your voice, so it may happen that your child or guest accidentally orders something over the Internet, simply by talking on the phone,” said Stephen Cobb, spokesperson for ESET North America.

This is exactly what happened the other day with users of the Amazon Echo system from San Diego, who watched the local TV channel CW6. His presenters, Jim Patton and Linda Martin, were talking to a child who accidentally ordered a dollhouse, giving the Alexa command. The situation is interesting, and the report was also entertaining. It was about the fact that at the beginning of this month, an American named Megan Naytzel received an unexpected order for a house - a big dollhouse for $ 170 and about two kilograms of cookies. As it turned out, the order was made by daughter Brooke, who recently turned six years old. She asked Alexa for the dollhouse and the cookies, getting everything she wanted a little later. The girl's mother immediately changed the security settings of the device, adding the need to confirm with the purchase. Journalists were discussing what had happened, and Patton said the following: “I liked the girl so much, who said“ Alexa, order me a dollhouse. ”


Immediately after the above-mentioned phrase from the report, Alexa in the region where the channel is broadcasting began ordering doll houses for many Amazon Echo owners. This did not happen to all users, but many people tell what happened online. True, it is unclear whether the virtual assistants were able to spend the real funds that were deducted from the credit cards of their owners, or whether they were only attempts to order what they heard.

Nevertheless, experts on network security argue that this situation is not the first and not the last, since the work of their IoT devices must be monitored.

The same expert from ESET stated the following: “All these devices from the world of the Internet of things have a certain level of access to network resources, and this access is active on many systems thanks to a specific set of settings. Therefore, you need to go into the settings and see what is there and how, changing the necessary parameters if necessary. " By the way, problems can be not only with virtual purchases. Without hearing your user, the column can tell a lot of unnecessary things, for example, a child.


Now, according to Cobb, the US Federal Trade Commission (Federal Trade Commission, FTC) is investigating this and similar cases. Commission representatives want to make sure that devices listening to voice commands are safe. “Technology is gradually becoming more complex, soon the devices will be able to identify certain people and listen only to users who have access,” says Cobb. Actually, this is not even the future - such systems already exist, although their work cannot yet be called very much reliable.


Another way to leverage the power of digital assistants

As for Amazon, this company claims the possibility of disabling the shopping function by the voice command of the user. In the settings of Alexa, you can not only disable this feature, but also set a confirmation for each attempt to buy something on the Internet using a virtual assistant.