Rockford: Your Ring Camera Could Get Hacked
Many people have Ring cameras set up to see what happens on their front porch, but some clever parents have also set them up inside the house to keep an eye on their kids. If you were contemplating doing that or have already set it up, you need to be wary.
A Mississippi family recently discovered that with new technology comes new problems. The LeMay family set up a Ring camera in their girls' room so that the mother could keep an eye on the three kids while she worked her overnight nurse shift, but what they got instead was someone who hacked into the camera and was able to talk to the girls and play music over the speaker, according to WTVO.
Thankfully, it was discovered very quickly — within four days. But the only reason they found out was because the person on the other end made an attempt to talk to the kids. Ring is investigating the situation but the LeMays have already pulled the camera down according to the report.
Consider this a warning, this family got lucky enough that the person on the other end made an attempt to communicate with them. But it makes you wonder if someone is watching you without saying anything.
UPDATE: A Ring spokesperson released the following statement:
Customer trust is important to us and we take the security of our devices seriously. Our security team has investigated this incident and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network.
Recently, we were made aware of an incident where malicious actors obtained some Ring users’ account credentials (e.g., username and password) from a separate, external, non-Ring service and reused them to log in to some Ring accounts. Unfortunately, when the same username and password is reused on multiple services, it’s possible for bad actors to gain access to many accounts.
Upon learning of the incident, we took appropriate actions to promptly block bad actors from known affected Ring accounts and affected users have been contacted. Consumers should always practice good password hygiene and we encourage Ring customers to change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication.