Consumer Reports, an influential US nonprofit group that runs wide-ranging reviews of kitchen appliances, automobiles and other goods, is gearing up to begin contemplating cyber-security privacy and safeguards when scoring products.

The group, which issues lots that rank said on Monday how nicely customer information is procured and it’d collaborated with several external organizations to come up with methodologies for analyzing how readily a merchandise could be hacked…..

Consumer Reports will slowly implement the newest methodologies, beginning with evaluation jobs that assess modest quantities of merchandises, the organization’s manager of electronic equipment testing, Maria Rerecich, said in a phone interview.

“This is a complex area. There will be plenty of refinement to get this right,” Rerecich said.

The effort follows a surge in cyber attacks leveraging easy-to-use vulnerabilities in routers, webcams, digital video recorders and other connected devices, which are sometimes together called the Internet of Things.

“Private cybersecurity and secrecy is a huge deal for everybody.

In one high profile October strike, hackers used a piece of software called Mirai to cripple an Internet infrastructure supplier, blocking access to Spotify PayPal, Twitter and tons of other sites for hours. Internet access is shut off by another strike in November to some 900,000 Deutsche Telekom customers.

Security scientists have said the strikes will likely continue because there’s little incentive for producers to spend on fixing apparatus that were linked.

Problems covered in the draft include reviewing whether applications is constructed using best security practices, examining simply how much info is gathered about a consumer and checking when an account is terminated, whether firms delete all user data.