Smart fridges could be used by paedophiles to store images

THE rise of the “internet of things” (IOT) will mean paedophiles are able to store child abuse images in smart devices, a think tank has warned.

The report suggests that innocent members of the public could see their smart fridges and TVS used as repositories for illegal abuse images by criminals. It said that the risk is likely to grow over the next three to five years as the prevalence of the “smart” items increases and they become more sophisticated.

Fred Langford, of the Internet Watch Foundation, which worked with Demos, the cross-party think tank, on the report, said internet-savvy paedophiles could “scan” for vulnerable devices anywhere in the world on

‘Because of the inherent nature of the lack of security with devices, it does mean that there’s a huge risk’

which to hide their images. Householders could even end up being investigated by police who believe that abuse images belong to them because they are stored on one of their devices, he warned.

“Because of the inherent nature of the lack of security with IOT devices as things stand, it does mean that there’s a huge risk,” he said.

“That person may not have actually put it there themselves, and it could be that it will be left on [them] to try and prove that, and they may not have the technical ability to be able to do that.”

Some companies have improved the security on their products but concerns have recently been raised over the hackability of children’s toys that are Bluetooth and Wi-fi enabled.

Most items currently on the market do not have enough memory to store images, but storage is becoming cheaper, raising the risk in future.

“It’s not beyond possibility to have a device that has a micro SD card, maybe to store information for a legitimate reason, but for somebody who wants to hack in and use it for something else, that’s a free chunk of storage that they could exploit,” he said.

Many items are sold with stock passwords, making it easy for criminals to hack them if they are not changed, he added. The report also suggests police should focus on those carrying out the abuse and making images rather than low-level offenders as a “sensible way of targeting limited resources”.