Are Smart Locks Right For Your Home?
Home automation is becoming the norm as more home owners buy into the convenience of smart phone controlled appliances and accessories. Stoves, ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, surveillance, solar technology, and other household items can all be controlled from the convenience of your smart phone. Now, while we are fans of technology, there are some things that we questions when automating our homes. Considering that just about any network device that is connected to the internet can be hacked and taken over, should you consider keeping the door locks on your home manual and stay away from smart locks? If you’re dealing with a savvy criminal, accessing your door locks may be easier than ever with network vulnerability. We reached out to Okey Locksmith in Oklahoma City to get some feedback on these new digital door locks and this is what we came away with.
Digital locks are convenient and offer luxuries like remote assistance. This would allow you to unlock the front door for the kids if they lost their house key, even if you were in another state. This is done over a secure WiFi network and allows a user to unlock the door of a property with smart locks via a smartphone application. While this is extremely convenient and can prevent all sorts of problems, it also introduces other potential threats to your home security. While you still need to worry about traditional criminals picking locks, breaking windows, or sneaking through an unlocked garage door, you now need to worry about cyber-crooks remotely accessing your door locks and opening them. These faceless criminals are just as dangerous as the ones lurking around your neighborhood. One they have hacked into a door lock, the possibility that they can access other network devices becomes critical. Cameras and other monitoring devices can be used by criminals to monitor the home and spy on you.
Keeping your home and family safe from criminals is a number one priority for most families, and yet we are becoming ore vulnerable as technology gives us more access to the automation featured of our homes. If you are considering digital locks for your home, consider buying a higher end digital lock that has good product reviews and offers multiple layers of security when authenticating door-unlocking requests from IP addresses other than those on your safe list.