First, we learn our toilets are vulnerable to hacking. Now we have to worry about our baby monitors.
A husband and wife in Houston, Texas, overheard their baby monitor saying abusive, sexual things to their 2-year-old Allyson, who fortunately could not hear the barrage of insults because she was born deaf and wears cochlear implants.
“It felt like somebody broke into our house,” the girl’s father Marc Gilbert told ABC 13. “He said, ‘Wake up you little sl#t.'” Gilbert said the hacker saw the name “Allyson” written on her bedroom wall, so that’s how he figured out her name.
Gilbert immediately unplugged the camera, which can access the Internet and is manufactured by Foscam. In April, it was discovered that Foscam had a “firmware vulnerability” and many of its cameras were equipped with old firmware, allowing people to gain control of their devices remotely, Forbes reports. The company released new firmware updates in June in an attempt to solve the problem.
Generally, baby monitor cameras that connect to the Internet increase the risk of hacking, so if “you do use a web-connected device then you must ensure software is always up-to-date,” Professor Alan Woodward of the Department of Computing at the University of Surrey told the BBC.
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