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Don't Feed Them After Midnight: Reverse-Engineering the Furby Connect

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Re: Don't Feed Them After Midnight: Reverse-Engineering the Furby Connect

#8
post #2

Company response is so typical, it hurts to read.

Why? As long as it doesn't have a microphone/camera then this sounds like a positive.

And they don't collect any sort of personal data. Hasbro did a pretty solid job here minimizing risk surface area.

Re: Don't Feed Them After Midnight: Reverse-Engineering the Furby Connect

#9
post #7

All it takes is a single goatse to appear on one child's furby's eyes or on a demo unit in a shop and the brand is ruined. I think they need to reconsider that response.

Perhaps you're unaware that an earlier edition of this product had a bug that made the device randomly speak with a terrifying satanic voice. My niece experienced it first hand

Re: Don't Feed Them After Midnight: Reverse-Engineering the Furby Connect

#10

Why don't they just enable basic Bluetooth security features instead of saying that it's too hard to exploit and leaving it at that? Excellent write-up though.

Because they probably paid some contractor to design it and requesting this as an update would be expensive. Most likely some director doesn't think it's worth the money. Furthermore, the security team / one random guy who is now told to handle security duties after they got that e-mail most likely has an IT background and thinks reverse engineering embedded systems is impossibly difficult.

It would only be done if the press started publishing clickbait involving "THIS TOY IS WATCHING YOUR CHILDREN!!" as most IoT security not done by the top companies is entirely reactive.

Just a guess though. Never worked for Hasbo.

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