LateralAccessDevice

Why Close the Curtains? Your TV Is Showing Your Dirty Underwear to the World

It’s not just celebrities who get their private pictures stolen and published for all to see. It’s an equal opportunity hack and could happen to anyone with a computer, tablet or smart TV connected to the Internet. It’s a very simple scenario: someone hacks into your computer and copies its files, including your digital photos, or harvests the password to your account in the cloud. Once those photos are out in the wild, pictures of you and your family could show up anywhere. Or, someone hacks into the smart TV in your bedroom and uses its camera and microphone to record voice and image files of you and your spouse. Youtube may have a new star….

Given the vagaries of human nature, stolen images of you or your kids may become an angle for the hacker to extort you. And you hope that paying the hacker’s demands will keep you out of the public eye, but, of course, there are no guarantees when dealing with thieves. It’s an unfortunate reality for the digital age: You take the picture, the hackers help you share it. Social media sites are only too happy to make money off of it, too, no questions asked.

Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents. This type of crime has become prevalent enough to affect many private individuals. Just recently, miscreants in rural Idaho – with little technical knowledge -- were jailed for blackmailing dozens of women over indiscreet images. Plenty of software tools to conduct these campaigns are available for anyone to use, without having to write a single line of code, and hackers develop new exploits all the time. Today it’s the camera in your kids’ tablet, tomorrow the TV in your bedroom – as “smart,” connected gadgets proliferate throughout our homes, so will the hacks to get to them.

Beyond foreswearing any gadgets with digital cameras and microphones and banning them from your home, our technology safeguards your privacy and prevents exploitation of your smart TV’s camera and microphone. LateralAccessDevice (LAD) for example, puts you in control, letting you selectively block or allow communications to, from and between your individual computing devices, including computers, smart TVs, IoT devices – basically anything with computing power and connected to your network – with nuance and sophistication, while at the same time creating a digital record of any digital communications you choose to allow. Further options such as date and time scheduling and triggers also make it possible to engage different rules at different times, for example, cutting off the Internet to your kid’s computers at 10:00PM, or automatically locking down a device if someone tries to call into it, say from a hacker’s lair. All of this with an interface and features designed for non-technical users, bringing state-of-the-art technology into the hands of anyone who cares to use it.

In a perfect world, we would not need to worry about our private, never-published photos appearing on the Internet, but unfortunately we have to deal with unscrupulous people intent on exploiting the flaws and features of the technologies we use daily to steal, cheat, embarrass and harm. It used to be that you had to send your videos into shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos, but now they can be shown around the world at the click of a mouse. Luckily, with a common sense approach and our easy to use LAD technology, we can make ourselves a harder target to hit, even in our less-than-perfect computing world, which now encompasses much more than just computers.

LAD: LateralAccessDevice is software that turns a computer chassis into a high-performance, multi-purpose Internet / network tool that combines multi-dimensional firewalling, network monitoring, access control, packet capture, DNS, NAT and a host of other applications into one easy to use, integrated, high-security package. LAD takes you back to before the Internet!