Common household items such as fish tanks, children's toys and even garage doors are all potential targets for hackers to access your homes, according to an expert.
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Many smart devices do not have the type of security protections that homeowners expect, University of Queensland senior law lecturer Mark Burdon said.
"We just had a situation in the US where it looked like a casino had been hacked, and it looked like the point of access for the hackers was a wireless based fish tank," Dr Burdon said.
Designed so the tank environment could be monitored remotely, Dr Burdon said it created a security headache for the casino.
"Once the attackers had gotten through the fish tank they were able to access all of the casino network and different devices and different databases," he said.
Dr Burdon appeared on ABC Radio National on Tuesday to discuss the safety of smart homes, as a part of the Organised Crime and Corruption Forum. He said these types of homes had allowed for micro-ransomware attacks where hackers gain access to household infrastructure, such as garage doors, and demand money.
"So when you try to leave for work in the morning you can't get your car out of the garage, and you're prompted to pay quite a small ransom fee," Dr Burdon said.
"It can be a few dollars or it can be $10 or $20 to open the door."
However, Dr Burdon said the huge amounts of data generated from smart home devices could be used to help identify domestic abuse and violence patterns.
"Once you start aggregating all of this data together, it's possible that you can identify a different number of patterns and behaviours of individuals in the home," he said.
"Now once you get to that status it may be possible to identify certain patterns of abuse and domestic violence.
"If that's the case, the question, therefore, ships to what reporting obligations should be placed on them (data collectors) if they identify suspected patterns of domestic violence or abuse?"
Dr Burdon said the best thing people with smart homes could do was read the privacy policy of the devices.
"At least that will give you a bit of an understanding of what is happening to the data that is being generated, who is using it, and the purpose of the generation or the purpose the data will be used for," he said.
