Before and after: What looks like a normal bookcase is really concealing a secret door

Builders are getting requests to create hidden rooms in private homes, to serve as home offices, reading rooms, home theaters, wine cellars, children's play spaces or security zones.

"People are realizing they're not just for the movies, anyone can have one," said Steve Humble, president of Creative Home Engineering in Arizona.

His company designs and creates disguised entryways to hidden spaces -- everything from stone walls that open up, armoires with a trap back door, and of course, the bookcase that unveils a concealed room.

Entry into a clandestine spaces can vary, including pulling off the homeowner's favorite book from a shelf, touching the right spot on a wall, or even having to play the right series of notes on a piano or moving chess pieces in the right order to get a wall to move.

Humble said requests for incognito doors has increased in the past few years, and that the trend has shifted toward security recently. About 30% of his business is creating designs for high-security rooms, which can involve bullet- and soundproof doors, integrated alarm systems with surveillance and retina or finger scans.

Some ultra covert clients don't want anyone knowing about a concealed room -- even the people building it.

"Occasionally, there is someone who doesn't want the contractor to know the secret," said Humble. "The crews and professionals think the room is an ordinary room, then after they go, we place the secret door."

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Roddy De La Garza, a real estate agent in Dallas, is about to list a home with a secret media room, but he won't publicly advertise the hidden space. The room will only be disclosed during walk throughs, in case a buyer wants to use it for more secure purposes, he explained.

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Look what these homes are hiding

However, because most smart home devices run on wireless technology, some observers fear residences could become a prime target for hackers in an era when online security is becoming a hotly debated topic.

In a world where social media accounts and smart devices are routinely compromised, analysts point out it would pose little challenge for a hacker to access a home security system or a webcam. It also raises the question about whether companies like Sengled can navigate the shoals of privacy and efficiency.

"Consumers are entitled to privacy, but it is the protection of this privacy that is key to success," Ruan said, adding that most personal devices come with "a tradeoff between privacy and convenience" that most consumers tacitly acknowledge, if not completely accept.

In that vein, smart home hardware isn't altogether different from a credit card or a cell phone, which are considered secure, until they aren't.

"For the most part, our cards are secure and, in cases where our cards are physically or virtually stolen, the card issuing bank steps in to protect consumers from fraud," Ruan said. "We [also] view our mobile phones as highly secure," even in the possibility of wiretapping, he added.

Like card issuers and wireless companies, privacy fears will place the onus on smart technology providers to "ensure a high level of security," Ruan said.

"The underlying success of personal privacy lends to a business model where service providers are the entity that secure the network, devices, and services" he added.

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Poor or lacking security on millions of ADSL routers and other devices used by teleworkers represents a threat to global enterprise information security, researchers have warned.

Unscrupulous internet service providers (ISPs) distribute routers that often have several security vulnerabilities, Cisco consultants Kyle Lovett and Dor Tumarkin told the CrestCon & IISP Congress 2015 in London.

Most of these vulnerabilities are well-known and well-documented, and yet ISPs continue to distribute routers without any security evaluation.

Wide swathes of IP space are being made vulnerable through ISPs in developing countries distributing routers with default passwords that can be easily found on the internet, said Lovett.

He estimates that between 25 million and 80 million devices used in small office and home office environments can be accessed remotely because default passwords are rarely changed by users.

Attackers can locate vulnerable devices using internet scans and websites such as Shodan which publishes an index of internet-exposed devices.

Research has shown that 14 suppliers have distributed over a million ADSL routers with firmware dating from 2007 that contains multiple critical vulnerabilities that could allow hackers full control.

Vulnerable routers can be exploited by attackers to carry out DNS redirection attacks or hijack them to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks using DNS amplification.

This means attackers can alter thedomain name system(DNS) configuration on these devices to redirect victims to IP addresses and domains controlled by the attacker.

Attackers can conductman-in-the-middleattacks or redirect victims to anywhere they want, inject their own adverts into web pages or poison search results.

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