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Baby Monitor Hacker Still Terrorizing Babies And Their Parents

This article is more than 9 years old.

Last summer, someone hacked into a Houston couple's baby monitor in order to yell at their daughter and tell her to "wake up, you little slut." The Gilbert family was using an Internet-connected Foscam product that had known vulnerabilities that would make it easy for a knowledgeable intruder to get into it and control it. (Think Heartbleed.) Foscam released a firmware update that fixed the problem but people like the Gilberts who bought their camera through a reseller did not get the company's email about the fix, and apparently didn't hear about the 'Babybleed' problem. At the time, I wrote that 40,000 other cams were still vulnerable to hacking, according to security researchers. Well, a hacker found one of those vulnerable cams -- again being used as a baby monitor -- in Cincinnati.

An Ohio couple was terrified when a hacker took over a 10-month-old baby’s video monitor and started screaming ‘Wake up baby!’ in the middle of the night.

Adam and Heather Schreck were stunned, but Adam quickly rushed into their frightened daughter’s room — only to see the camera pointed at them and the “intruder” screaming obscenities.

Via The Daily News

The infantile incident sounds very similar to the Gilberts': yelling obscenities at a baby and her dumbfounded parents. If it's not the same guy, it's a copycat. The media reports that the Schrecks unplugged the monitor to get the hacker out of their house. Marc Gilbert, the father of the Houston toddler, did the same thing. Unfortunately, when you power off the camera, it wipes its log of IP addresses. Disconnecting it eliminates the evidence that police might use to find out who is doing this.

A researcher told me last summer that Foscam could put a message in their Web interface telling people to update their firmware to protect themselves. It's unclear why the company hasn't done that yet. In the meanwhile, if you're at a breeding friend's house and you see a baby monitor that looks like this, you might want to warn them about boogeyhackermen in the night.

As we increasingly bring Internet-connected devices into our homes and workplaces, we have more devices that can be hacked if they are not properly designed. One family complained that a hacker started sending them harassing messages via their cable box. There's a whole slew of researchers looking for and pointing out vulnerabilities in these products, but their announcements don't come with a bleeding-heart logo that ensures consumers are aware of the problem.