Online forums trade in small programs that allow them to capture surveillance camera accounts. This is reported by journalists of "Motherboard". The perpetrators can thus take control of the cameras and spy on their owners.
A television station in Tennessee has also documented such a case: A mother had bought a camera of the Amazon subsidiary Ring on Black Friday and installed in the bedroom of her three little daughters to keep an eye on them, even if she has night shift.
Four days later, the built-in speaker suddenly played music when one of the daughters was in the room. When asked who is there, a male voice answered, "It's me, Santa Claus, I'm your best friend." You can see and hear this in the video recording, which the broadcaster published in part.
Each time I've watched this video it's given me chills.
A Desoto County mother shared this ring video with me. She was hacked the camera and started talking to her 8-year-old daughter.
More at 6 on # WMC5 pic.twitter.com/77xCekCnB0
As "Motherboard" further reported, there was even a podcast in which hackers made public, as they took over the accounts of foreign surveillance cameras from Ring or even the Google subsidiary Nest and then bothered their owners through the integrated speakers and insulted. Recently, the operators of the podcast as well as the associated forum but apparently tried to remove all references to the illegal hacks.
Ring: Users should provide more security themselves
Ring responded to the reports by saying that they were not security holes or compromise on the part of the vendor. Rather, users should be more secure themselves by giving unique passwords to their accounts and setting up two-factor authentication. In addition, access data should not be shared with others - Ring instead offers device owners the option to add more users with limited rights.
Ring and other manufacturers do not want to enforce strict security measures because devices in the "Internet of Things" should be as easy to use as possible. For the caper of an account, however, it can be enough to try access data from large leaks or lists of popular passwords - so the programs traded in forums apparently work. Because many people use the same combination of e-mail address and password for multiple services.
