At least in years past we could at least spot the neighbors as they tried to hide behind the shrubs in the garden, the curtains in the house, or ducked down below the fence line that separated each of our little slices of the American Dream....

These days; however, things are a little more subtle (if the neighbors have been paying attention to the InfoSec world for more than 5 minutes...)

Long gone are the days of just borrowing the neighbors wireless to launch an attack against the NSA through their cable provider (although it IS fun to see the black suburban roll up occasionally to their doorstep when you’re feeling mischievous..)

Today’s targets for neighborhood “watching” vary across an entire spectrum of fun and games...

I still feel slightly guilty about the 50-gallon barrel of lube my neighbors have, but “Hey Siri...” we just have to have some fun....

I DO enjoy making their microwave go off in the middle of the night, although they've replaced it a few times now, and the electrician doesn’t use Google Maps anymore to find them... amazing just how far away those WEMO plugs can be controlled from.

Now, thankfully Xfinity allows themselves to provide “free” WiFi to anyone with account credentials, so it IS still possible to get directly TO their router (you’d think folks would update the things.... but no) and given I’ve got around 1,335,000 Xfinity account ID/Passwords I’m set for a LONG time before I must leave my own fingerprints...

Oh, speaking of fingerprints, confession time... one of the neighbors has a RING doorbell, oh how we laughed when we changed out the screws during install and just last week got the doorbell to short circuit and burn ½ the place down... shame the fire alarms didn’t work, someone should REALLY unblock NEST’s fire alarms from the firewall and allow them to do their job. The video of the owners yelling “Hey Google FFS call the fire brigade” will be posted on YouTube later (thanks Arlo for the default account credentials...)

Oh, while we’re on the subject of the recently deceased, I guess playing Poltergeist on the other neighbors Roku device and having it display on all their nice Samsung IoT enabled TV’s is probably a mean thing to do... although it does make for entertainment as we might have also hooked up their Phillips Hue to pulse at the same frequency as the TV... I guess that’s why they seem a little nervous these days.

Oh, and we won’t mention the fun we had with the Tesla and some bright spark in the neighborhood thinking they could geofence the car into opening/closing the garage as they came home... Watching the garage door rapidly open and close AS the car tried to get in watching Grandma eat dinner with her falsies...

Speaking of that, I need to go mess with dear old Grandma’s IoT toothbrush, I think tonight we’ll set it for “killer mode” and see if it can chase her round the bathroom again...

We haven’t even gotten to the fun part watching the cute couple across the road react as their adult toys came to life in the middle of a webinar and started to inch across the desk... now THAT was fun to record… got to LOVE Bluetooth enabled things.

You get the idea; the neighborhood is SO much more fun these days....

Join us tonight as we talk though the evolution of the nosey neighbor :)