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Do It yourself home security getting easier

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How would you like a home security system that’s also your personal assistant? Angee Inc., a new company out of San Francisco, knows you’d like one.

ANG2Features of the Angee Device

  • Smartphone controlled
  • Has a Full HD camera with night vision.
  • Learns habits of and senses presence of household members to automatically arm and disarm.
  • Camera rotates 360 degrees—and does so as it detects motion; intruders will not be able to get out of view while they’re burglarizing.
  • Security tags provide security of a property’s entire perimeter, so that entrance via a tagged door or window will be detected.

Furthermore, says an article on gizmag.com:

  • The Angee system is portable, is powered by a battery and has local data storage.
  • So if there’s a power outage, Angee will be able to keep monitoring your home for at least eight hours.
  • Angee can record about an hour of high definition footage, and longer at lower quality.
  • Footage can also be stored in the cloud. However, Angee can distinguish between benign activity and suspicious activity, so there shouldn’t be any useless footage time.

How can Angee tell suspicious activity from normal activity?

  • It learns to recognize the movement patterns of household members. Intruders move differently.
  • Burglars also enter and exit their target homes in a peculiar manner.
  • If the burglar has an accomplice, there’s likely to be conversation, and Angee will detect these unfamiliar voices.
  • Angee will recognize familiar people by their voice or by a Bluetooth signal that connects with their smartphone.
  • If the Angee user has an iOS or Android, they will receive an alert when Angee detects suspicious activity; Angee will then stream video of this activity.

The gizmag.com article further explains that Angee can be controlled by voice commands, including recognition of vocal passwords. Angee is practically human, as it can even remind you to close windows if rain is predicted. It can also check your calendar and answer the phone. There are many ways the user can “program” Angee to behave, and Angee also gets smarter and more personalized the longer you have it in your home.

Through a Kickstarter campaign, Angee Inc., has raised over $260,000 and is still going. The unit is projected to retail at $429, and the expected delivery date is October of 2016.

Robert Siciliano, personal and home security specialist to Angee. Learn more about Angee in this Video. Support Angee on Kickstarter. See Disclosures.

How Hackers are Hacking Smarthomes

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“My house was hacked!” Had you said this 25 years ago, people would have thought a burglar vandalized it with an axe. Say it today and nearly everybody will know what you mean: A thief or prankster “broke” in to your house via its connected-to-the-Internet gadgets.

4DIf something’s connected, like your refrigerator, the possibility of hacking exists. All of these smarthome gadgets make it to market without a lot of attention on security, leaving them with “back doors” through which hackers could enter. This creates a larger “surface area” for potential cyber invasions.

In January 2014, connected refrigerators were actually sending out spam e-mails. So don’t think that all of this is just hyped up anxiety. And unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve already heard about the man who hacked into a baby monitor and yelled obscenities through it. A hacker could infiltrate through any vulnerable device in your house and use it as a launching pad to get into your e-mail account and redirect your web traffic to them.

Though nothing is ever 100 percent secure, the issue boils down to how important it is for you to control your home’s thermostat or coffee pot while you’re away, which means adding one more “smart” thing to your house, increasing its surface area of potential attack.

Smart gadgets are especially vulnerable to attack because they may not be replaced for many years, such as a smart washing machine. This means the appliance or device needs to have a long-term ability to receive security updates.

To combat security threats, makers of smart gadgets and appliances need to have security in mind from the beginning of manufacturing. They need to set up a monitoring system for these products for as long as they are in use, so that the smart washer is just as protected in its 15th year of use by the homeowner as it is in its first year.

Though the smart coffee pot may come across as a status symbol of a tech-savvy person with money to burn, some smart devices can save money such as a system that monitors water usage and can even identify which pipe has a leak.

The homeowner has to do a risk/benefit analysis and just perhaps forego the coffee pot and the smart egg container that tells you when you’re down to your last few eggs. To check if your kids are sleeping you may just have to do it the old-fashioned way: walking to their bedroom and peeking in.

When making an investment in smarthome devices make sure to check out the reviews, do your research to see if anyone has experienced security issues. And make sure to update any software of firmware over the lifespan of the device.

Robert Siciliano personal and home security specialist to BestHomeSecurityCompanys.com discussing burglar proofing your home on Fox Boston. Disclosures.