Security News > 2021 > March > Smart doorbells on business premises make your property more attractive to burglars, warns researcher
Installing a smart doorbell on your abode could actually increase your home's attractiveness to burglars, researchers from Britain's Cranfield University have said.
Instead, he said in a summary of a research paper published on the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats' website, smart doorbells and smart locks could actually make things worse.
Smart locks have long been a plaything for security consultants who enjoy contrasting vendors' claims about the tech-enabled gadgets with their actual efficacy.
Relying on internet-connected gadgets to secure one's home or to remotely view footage of folk knocking at the door leads to other failure modes not experienced with a physical lock and key; to wit, service provider outages KO'ing your smart security gadget.
Worryingly, the use of smart home security gadgets could, or so Cranfield said, lead to "An increase in group-performed planned burglary" with smart crooks exploiting "Unintended information leakage in the cyber domain" to gain access to unsuspecting businesses' premises.
A product called the KeyWe smart lock, which combined a traditional metal key with smartphone-based authentication, was rendered useless in late 2019 after Finnish infosec firm F-Secure looked closely at it.