It's not usual for a child to talk to his or her toys, but these days those toys are actually listening. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this is text up Daily. A lot has changed since I was a kid. Back then, toys were mostly made of dumb plastic. They were inert, only given life through the imaginations of those who played with them, and thus my epic saga of what would happen if he Man joined forces with Hans Solo to fight off the evil Barbie invasion came to pass. Uh,
my sister owned the Barbie doll. But these days toys can contain technologies that make them far more interactive. The creative process is no longer a one way street, and in at least some of those implementations, there's the potential for a lot to go wrong. We're in the age of connectivity, and that extends down to the toys companies
are making for kids. These toys use technologies like WiFi and blue tooth to receive information from the Internet, enhancing the toys features so that it can do more stuff with those who play with it. For example, Hasbro markets the Furby Connect interactive toy. Furbi's debut in the late nineteen nineties. At that time they were considered pretty advanced. Initially, a Furby can only speak in Gibberish. Canonically, it's a language called Furbish. Over time, the Furbi begins to throw
in some English words among the nonsense. This was to mimic the way children pick up language over time. The toys give the appearance of interactivity, but the truth of the matter was that Furbies were simply following a preprogrammed pathway. I hope that didn't come as a shock to anyone. The Furby Connect is a toy that can actually change how it interacts with people over time. You pair the toy with a companion mobile app. You can use the app to interact with the toy or update it with
new behaviors, games, and other features. It's a clever way to keep the toy relevant and fun to play with. Unfortunately, that same connectivity gives toys like the Ferbie Connect It's nifty features can also introduce security and privacy vulnerabilities. The UK Consumers Association site, which published an article in November saying that many of these connected toys, including the Ferbie Connect, are vulnerable to malicious interference. According to the article, it
doesn't even require any hacking in some cases. A few of these toys allow anyone to connect to a device within Bluetooth range without any security measures to block them. That means a person within range could potentially affect a toy. Some of these toys allow you to send a message to the toy, which then can be converted into a verbal message from the toy itself. In a video published on the WHICH article, a young boy is playing with
a robot with this Bluetooth connectivity. A lurking figure outside the window notices this and uses a smartphone to connect to the toy and sends a message to the young boy asking him to open the front door. The site acknowledges that for this to work in the way shown in the video, the connection would need to be unsecured and the potential threat would have to be quite close.
The broadcast range for Bluetooth is about ten meters. WiFi connected toys might have a slightly greater range, depending upon the router, though if the WiFi network isn't secured, then there may be other issues to deal with beyond compromised toys. Some consumer advocacy groups have voice. Similar concerns about other toys,
including those toys capacity to listen in on conversations. Some of these toys are meant to allow children to talk to them, ask questions, and hold basic conversations, but that means the toys themselves need microphones and have to send information to the cloud to get appropriate responses. That means the toys are effectively listening, and if a toy is listening in might pick up stuff it's not supposed to hear.
Depending upon how that information is processed in the cloud, the data could end up causing harm further down the road. In twenty hackers showed they could compromise the Hello Barbie connected doll and use it to spy on people. At first, it seemed like Mattel, a manufacturer of Barbie dolls, had done a decent job with security. The Barbie doll would only listen when you pressed a button that would activate
the microphone. Further, the doll would encrypt recorded audio, making it unintelligible to anyone who might intercept the file as it was sent from doll to Mattel's servers. But hackers figured out how to compromise the doll itself. Over WiFi connections. Presumably they had physical access to the doll and connected it to their own WiFi network to make the changes.
Once they had done so, they could remove some of those safety features so that they could listen in even if the button were not pressed, and skip that whole encryption process. The doll would effectively become a bug, kind of like in spy movies. Also, spy movie Barbie would be a pretty cool toy. According to the Guardian, compromising the doll would be just the first step. Accessing information on the doll itself would give hackers the information they
need to log into the target's WiFi network. In other words, they could access the WiFi password and then intrude on that network, pretend really snooping on communications or compromising other connected systems within the home. The doll would become a gateway to a person's entire network. In this case, it requires a lot more work than just connecting to an unsecured toy over Bluetooth. But the point the hackers were making is that in the age of connectivity, this is
also an age of security vulnerabilities. We need to take greater care in designing and implementing technologies that connect wirelessly to networks, particularly when those technologies are intended for children. To learn more about internet security, wireless technologies, and high tech toys, check out the tech Stuff podcast we publish on Wednesdays and Fridays and take a deep dive on these subjects and more. I'll see you again soon.