Driving around costs gas and time every time you go do it.
Compromising the centralized server is a one-time cost; once you've snuck something in there to regularly send updates where you can see them, you get alerts on those 1/100 houses that are rich and dumb enough to pay for this overpriced "smart" boiler. Maybe you can even work out a way to let people all over the world subscribe to these updates for a fee and let them take the risk of actually breaking in and fencing stuff.
Heck, you could even hack your way into a bunch of other smart home servers, and bundle all of that up into a nice little darknet service offering regular updates of stuff like "everyone in a 20mi radius of a given point who is setting all their smart stuff to vacation mode". That sounds like it might be a pretty nice passive income stream if you don't care about the very obvious legal/ethical issues involved.
And maybe your nice little darknet service could also let people say "hey, do you know anything about jon-wood?" and reply with "why yes we do, here's a few hints, would you like to pay for more?".
The risk/reward calculations on this might only work out if you're a regular employee of a highly-organized crime ring instead of the mysterious hacker running a darknet site that serves as one of many hubs of a decentralized crime syndicate, I dunno. The hacker sure makes for a cooler story if you're writing a techno-thriller or a cyberpunk novel though. :)
Compromising the centralized server is a one-time cost; once you've snuck something in there to regularly send updates where you can see them, you get alerts on those 1/100 houses that are rich and dumb enough to pay for this overpriced "smart" boiler. Maybe you can even work out a way to let people all over the world subscribe to these updates for a fee and let them take the risk of actually breaking in and fencing stuff.
Heck, you could even hack your way into a bunch of other smart home servers, and bundle all of that up into a nice little darknet service offering regular updates of stuff like "everyone in a 20mi radius of a given point who is setting all their smart stuff to vacation mode". That sounds like it might be a pretty nice passive income stream if you don't care about the very obvious legal/ethical issues involved.
And maybe your nice little darknet service could also let people say "hey, do you know anything about jon-wood?" and reply with "why yes we do, here's a few hints, would you like to pay for more?".
The risk/reward calculations on this might only work out if you're a regular employee of a highly-organized crime ring instead of the mysterious hacker running a darknet site that serves as one of many hubs of a decentralized crime syndicate, I dunno. The hacker sure makes for a cooler story if you're writing a techno-thriller or a cyberpunk novel though. :)