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News reports coming in say the Japanese Government had passed an amendment to a law to allow officials to hack into citizen’s Internet of Things (IoT) devices to compile a list of devices that are prone to hacking.
The government will try to break into the devices as a part of an exercise to be undertaken by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT); The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will supervise the survey.
A report in ZDNet said default passwords and password dictionaries will be used to hack into citizen’s devices. The reason: The Japanese government wants to identify the devices that are using easy to guess passwords and can be hacked easily. The owners of such devices will be, then, notified and will be urged to change the password.
The survey will be started next month onwards, and more than 200 million IoT devices including routers and web cameras will be tested.
The plan is to secure all the devices before the upcoming Summer Olympics that will be held in the capital Tokyo in 2020.