Another day, another wireless baby monitor hacked. Ah, if you are thinking that we’ve already looked at baby monitor hacking in April that would be true, but it’s happened twice more since then. More than likely it’s happened many times, but two families who used a wireless IP camera for a baby monitor took their hacking story to their local TV station.
Foscam wireless baby monitor hacked #1
Parents in Lacey, Washington, who were using a wireless Foscam IP camera as a baby monitor, said their three-year-old son had been telling them “for months [that] the 'telephone' was telling him to stay in bed.” They didn’t comprehend what that meant until they heard voices coming from the baby monitor and the camera followed them around the room.
The mom told KIRO 7 that at first she believed the voices were coming “from people being loud outside,” but she later heard noises coming from her son’s room while he was napping. When she walked in to investigate, she heard a woman’s voice saying, "Oh, watch this one, she's coming in again." The camera moved in her direction.
The Washington couple also heard a man’s voice saying, “Wake up, little boy, daddy’s coming for you.” Again the camera followed their movements around their son’s room.
So they called Foscam; in the words of KIRO 7 reporter Kevin McCarty, Foscam “told them that it was possible that someone somewhere hacked into the system and were controlling it with a laptop or a smartphone app, but there was no way of knowing who that was or whether they were living nearby or on the other side of the country.”
You know how you can call some business and be told one thing by one person and something entirely different by another person? There was not so much as a peep about checking the logs in the Washington baby monitor hacking story. Was that something the report left out or did the parents not check? Did Foscam even tell them to check the logs? Sure an IP address doesn’t guarantee it’s coming from the location it seems to be coming from, but instead of ‘it’s possible someone hacked it,’ the logs would definitely show if someone other than the parents accessed the camera system. Maybe after hearing the voices and the camera following the parents they don’t need to check the logs to know it was hacked?
Nevertheless, earlier this month after eerie music came from a hacked Foscam baby monitor, Foscam said, that its “cameras have embedded logs which allow you to see exactly which IP addresses are accessing the camera. You will be able to tell if an outsider has gained access to your camera.”
The parents said they had a password and username on the baby monitor as Foscam advised “but someone got in anyway.” The mom feels like their “privacy has been hacked” and indeed it was.
Baby monitor hacked #2
The second one is different in the fact that the wireless IP camera used as a baby monitor was not manufactured by Foscam. Instead it was a Summer Infant brand that at least one retailer's product details claim, "2.4GHz digital technology, ensuring parents a private and secure connection to baby."
A Whitewater, Kansas, mom told KWCH 12 that after she caught the camera meant to monitor her baby watching her, “Every single hair on my body stood up. I was freaked out… like very, very scary actually.”
She moved about the room and the camera followed her. After leaving the room to check if the handheld viewing device was possibly malfunctioning, she said the camera had moved again to follow her out of the room. “I knew someone was watching me. I yelled into the camera and I was like, 'quit watching me' but I didn't know what to do. I was just so scared and so shocked that this is actually happening to me.”
The Kansas mom returned the Summer Infant baby Wi-Fi monitor to the store that very day and purchased a baby monitor with no wireless capabilities. "I'm definitely a little bit more worried about this happening again," she said. "I was mad…like I was very angry that someone could be in my home watching me and my son doing our bedtime routine and him sleeping. It made me very, very angry."
So how did it happen? Although she had a password on the baby monitor, she had zero, zippy, negative none when it comes to a password on her Wi-Fi. Argh! She didn’t believe she needed a password on it “since she lives out in the country.”
“I want all the moms out there to know that you're not technically safe just because you either live in the country or you don't have any neighbors,” she added. “I want them to know to put passwords on these things and monitor whether someone is accessing them or not."