Think twice about buying internet-connected devices off eBay
Mike Murphy
The holiday season is the perfect time to shell out for the latest and greatest smart-home and internet-connected gadgets, like game consoles, drones, smart lightbulbs and switches. But if you’re thinking about taking advantage of the deals that can be had buying from second-hand and auction sites like eBay, first consider the potential risks. When you’re buying from a third-party seller, it’s a lot more difficult to tell where products have come from, whether you’re getting exactly what you think you’re getting, and if anything has been done to the product since it was manufactured. “It is possible for internet-connected devices to be tampered with and resold on the web,” Leigh-Anne Galloway, lead cybersecurity resilience analyst at the cybersecurity firm Positive Technologies, told Quartz. “It’s similar to buying a secondhand cellphone without it being restored to factory settings.”[…]
Related: https://firmwaresecurity.com/2016/09/07/us-cert-on-validation-of-grey-market-hardware/
Firmware Security 