While relatively safe, the reality is that someone can break into your garage by compromising your smart garage door opener. Anything connected to a network can be hacked, and smart garage door openers are no exception. Now that you know it’s possible, the next question is usually how big of a risk is this really? The good news is that the risk of someone compromising your smart garage door opener is extremely low.
The odds of someone breaking into your garage by brute force (breaking a window, picking a lock, etc.) are still far greater than the odds of a hacker gaining access to your smart garage door opener.
In fact, you’re better off spending your time and energy doing some basic things to make your garage more secure overall than worrying about your smart garage door opener being compromised.
Smart garage door openers are some of the safest smart devices on the market, and for good reason. Like smart locks, they protect access to your home, your valuables, and your loved ones. And like a lot of other smart devices these days, smart garage door openers typically use advanced encryption for data transmission to protect your privacy.
But security never ends with the device itself. Almost all smart devices “talk” to other services run by the manufacturer, or by third parties. Everything your device “talks” to is another link in the chain, and a potential security vulnerability.
For example, many WiFi enabled smart devices send their data to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. A vulnerability with AWS, however unlikely, could result in a vulnerability with your smart device. The simple fact is that anything connected to a network can be hacked.
But for the most part, the level of time, effort, expertise, and frankly luck, required to hack your smart garage door opener, is simply not worth it to a would-be hacker.
One of the best features of smart garage door openers is the ability to monitor your garage door remotely. Through a mobile app, you’ll be able to see if your garage door is open or closed, from anywhere in the world. You’ll even have an audit log of all the times throughout the day that your garage door was opened, and for how long.
There are a few things you can do to greatly reduce the risk of your smart garage door opener being compromised:
Get software updates
Manufacturers of these devices know that vulnerabilities can, and do exist, so they frequently make updates and patches to their software.
They even go as far as hiring third party security companies to audit their products from time to time to look for these vulnerabilities, expose them, and then inform them on how to fix the problem. So make sure that your smart garage door opener is getting these updates when they come!
Secure your WiFi network
Even more important than making sure your device gets regular security updates is ensuring that your home network is secure! That means having a strong password, and even using a VPN (virtual private network), if possible.
Make sure your garage is secure
Aside from making sure your smart garage door opener gets routine security updates and securing your WiFi network, you can make some easy, non-technical changes to your garage itself to increase security.
Again, more likely than not, if someone is going to break into your garage, it’s not going to be by hacking your device. They’re going to get in by other means.
Contact Midlothian Garage Doors today for help with repairing or installing a garage door.
