So I would imagine in today’s tech savvy colleges that a lot of people are using the fancy new smartwatches. With having all this wireless tech at you school you could run into a lot of problems with it comes to security. AIM College is no different. Through my research I have found that these watches can be and will be a big problem for them. Below, I will give some details from a study done on the new smartwatches to help further explain the risks.
HP assessed the available security features on 10 smartwatches along with their Android and iOS cloud and mobile application components and found every single device to have significant vulnerabilities such as insufficient authentication and lack of data encryption. As part of the study, HP looked at smartwatch management capabilities, network communications, their mobile and cloud interfaces and other potentially vulnerable components.
When HP tested the watches they noticed that they did not have a two-step authentication. None of the interfaces had the ability to lock out accounts after multiple failed login attempts. Not having proper authentication in place can cause a lot of headaches. Not only is the person’s personal data at risk, this could also give hackers access to the schools data as well. The watches also did not feature a function to lock the device out after a certain amount of failed log in attempts.
“We found that smartwatch communications are easily intercepted in 90 percent of cases, and 70 percent of watch firmware is transmitted without encryption,” says Daniel Miessler, lead researcher for the study at HP. “These statistics reveal areas of security risk and are extremely worrisome, as smartwatches are likely to become a key access control point as adoption expands,” Miessler said in emailed comments to Dark Reading.
Another concern is the recording capabilities that these watches have. This could be a problem in a school when it comes to cheating. This would allow students to...