You may think that hackers are only interested in getting into your phones, computers, and bank accounts, but it’s up to researchers around the world to preempt their actions and keep us all safe. And one of the directions they feel hackers will soon go, is towards sex toys.
In the recent past, makers of these sex toys have begun using other technologies in an attempt to improve their products. They’ve got everything from Bluetooth, to Wi-Fi, to cameras, all to help keep that long-distance relationship alive. And now, those very upgrades may be their undoing.
Italian cybersecurity researcher Giovanni Mellini just announced that not only was he able to hack into a Bluetooth-enabled butt plug this last week, but he was able to do it extremely easily.
The device in question, Hush by Lovesense, is marketed as the “world’s first teledildonic butt plug”. The basic idea is that you can pair it with a smart device, and then control it from anywhere. A naughty idea for couples looking to spice things up. Not so much however, when a hacker can take control of it.
Why is this such a scary development?
According to Mellini’s blog post, he was able to hack the butt plug using a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) scanner freely available on Github. Bluetooth isn’t known to be the most secure way to transfer data, and its low energy version is even more so. However, the technology has found a wide array of uses in the IoT sector because of its low power requirement.
Thanks to this, it’s relatively easy to execute a man-in-the-middle attack, where a hacker can trick the sex toy into thinking it’s connected to the paired device and snatch up data sent between the two. In this way, Mellini was able to remotely pair with the butt plug without any sort of password, pin or authentication. Worrying enough when your phone is involved, but probably worse when the device in question being hacked is in your rear.
Of course, while you may think this is a limited case, it has worse implications for the future, especially when you consider those sex toys with embedded cameras we talked about earlier. Suddenly, what you expected to be a way to be intimate with a partner across a vast distance is instead fuel for a hacker blackmailing you. And that’s just the tip of the teledildonic iceberg.