The Japanese Government has decided to hack into the Internet of Things(IoT) devices of their citizens to conduct a survey on the insecure IoT devices to make it more secure. The Government employees will be hacking into the millions of IoT devices of people starting from the routers and web cameras. These have raised anger and arguments between people who are concerned about their privacy.
The Government has come up with this idea to secure the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics this coming year. They believe this step can help them from hackers who may use IoT devices to attack and create trouble in the game. So the hacking is done to understand their flaws and correct them to ensure maximum IT security beforehand.
They aim at testing the security of over 200 million IoT devices for securing the passwords. The plan is to find the insecure devices which use default and easy passwords and alert them to make it more secure. The first step of the plan will be conducting a survey which is scheduled for this month.
The survey will be led by the employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). The employees will be allowed to log into the people’s IoT devices and find out the easily hackable ones. The details of the insecure devices will be then passed to ISPs and the local authorities, who are assigned to alert the consumers. This can help to get rid of low-security software and prevent attacks from serious hackers on the devices.
Even though the hacking is done for the greater good, it has led to privacy issues among the people. Some are not ready to accept this idea since the employees will know their details and questions are raised whether these employees will stay on their legal limits or not.
Some others argue that they couldn’t be sure of the people changing their passwords after the personal notifications although strong dispute exists the Japanese Government has decided to go on with their plan.
