Hacked Baby Monitor Caught Spying On 2-Year-Old Girl In Texas (UPDATE)
The Huffington Post | By Ryan Grenoble Posted: 08/13/2013 7:19 pm EDT | Updated: 08/14/2013 11:18 am EDT
If you need another reason to make sure your networks are secure and up to date, here it is: hacked baby monitors.
In a true nightmare story, two Texas parents say they woke up this past weekend to hear a stranger's voice coming from the room of their 2-year-old girl.
"It felt like somebody broke into our house," Marc Gilbert told ABC affiliate KTRK.
As Gilbert walked down the hall and entered the room, he says he heard the voice say, "Wake up Allyson, you little [expletive]." The camera on their trusted baby monitor then rotated to watch Marc walk into the room as he rushed to unplug it.
Marc said Allyson has impaired hearing and apparently slept through the entire baby monitor incident. Regardless, it has left the family shaken.
"I don't think it ever will be connected again ... I think we are going to go without the baby monitor now," Gilbert told ABC News.
Hackers targeting webcams on laptops and other computers is nothing new. The uber-creepy (not to mention illegal) practice, known as "ratting," was well documented in an Ars Technica article published in March. But baby monitors? That's enough to make us fear the boogeyman again.
UPDATE: Aug. 14 -- Forbes believes the device Gilbert installed as a baby monitor was a Foscam wireless camera, which boasts "remote internet monitoring from anywhere in the world" as one of its top features. The camera has a known firmware vulnerability that can be exploited via a number of methods. A firmware update has been released to address the problem.
In a comment posted to the original ABC story, Gilbert says he had a firewall enabled and both the camera and routers were password protected.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/hacked-baby-monitor-houston-texas-parents_n_3750675.html
