How I hacked my home

Note that these seem to be all local attacks - on a home network these devices will almost certainly all be behind a NAT, so they would not be remotely exploitable. A remote exploit i.e. over the Internet is far more worrying; these are not quite as bad in comparison.

Both compromised devices where running a Linux 2.6.x kernel, and a lot of interpreters such as perl and python. One of them also had the GNU C compiler installed, which would make the attackers' life much easier.

This is probably a side-effect of cheap Linux systems becoming available, and the general attitude of laziness and waste here really annoys me - having to download a firmware update that's tens or even hundreds of MB for a device whose featureset doesn't need even one tenth that amount of code to accomplish is absolutely insane. I miss the days when devices had just enough computing resources to do what they needed to, didn't need any updates because the firmware was pretty much perfect, and as a result were less likely to contain exploits. Now it seems "take an ARM devboard, connect something to the GPIO and ship the whole mess complete with the bloated Linux distro it came with" is the norm. I certainly won't be replacing the devices in my home with anything "smart" anytime soon.

"At this point I asked myself, 'is it really that easy?' I then thought about the two newly discovered vulnerabilities and realized both were in the administrative interface after authenticating as the administrative user. I needed to have the same preconditions as the attacker. So I tried to find vulnerabilities without using any of my access credentials."