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'Things' on the Internet-of-things have 25 vulnerabilities apiece

Leaking sprinklers, overheated thermostats and picked locks all online

Ten of the most popular Internet of Things devices contain an average of 25 security vulnerabilities, many severe, HP researchers have found.

HP's investigators found 250 vulnerabilities across the Internet of Things (IoT) devices each of which had some form of cloud and remote mobile application component and nine that collected personal user data.

Flaws included the Heartbleed vulnerability, cross site scripting, weak passwords and denial of service.

Some of the unnamed devices contained users' credit card data, date of birth details and name and address records.

"And with many devices transmitting this information unencrypted on your home network, users are one network misconfiguration away from exposing this data to the world via wireless networks," the company wrote in a report (PDF).

"Cloud services, which we discovered most of these devices use, are also a privacy concern as many companies race to take advantage of the cloud and services it can provide from the internet.

"Do these devices really need to collect this personal information to function properly?"

Most devices accepted the world's dumbest passwords including 12345 to secure remotely-accessible accounts and did not encrypt connections.

Six of the 10 had bugged web interfaces that contained persistent cross-site scripting, poor session management and weak default credentials and password-reset managers.

The report urges vendors to follow the OWASP Internet of Things Top Ten 2014 used to conduct the IoT test.

It recommended all IoT devices undergo a security review covering all components, build according to security standards and apply infosec to all stages of the development lifecycle. ®

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