Two more wireless baby monitors hacked

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Cyber intruders were able to hack wireless cameras to spy on babies and their parents. 

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Another week, another baby monitor hack. Or in this case, two hacks. One of the most recent incidents involved a mother who heard voices as her child’s wireless camera followed her around the room, while another mom was freaked out as a hacker remotely controlled the camera to spy on her movements. The scary thing is that similar occurrences have probably taken place a number of other times, but have just gone unreported.

First, a Washington mother said she heard another woman’s voice coming from her son’s Foscam baby monitor while he was taking a nap. “For months, my son was telling his family that the ‘telephone’ was telling him to stay in bed,” she told KIRO-TV. Finally, she heard the noises for herself coming from inside the child’s room during nap time. Initially, she thought it could have been coming from folks outside, however, a few hours later she noticed the sounds being emitted from the camera itself. An eery voice was heard over the device saying, “Oh, watch this one, she’s coming in again,” as the camera lens moved about the room.

The breach was reported to Foscam, who admitted it was possible the device’s cameras were being controlled remotely but they could not say from where.

The second hack is a bit different in the sense that the wireless IP camera used as a baby monitor was not manufactured by Foscam, but instead by the Summer Infant brand. A Kansas mother told KWCH 12 that after she caught the camera that was meant to monitor her baby watching her, “Every single hair on my body stood up. I was freaked out… like very, very scary actually.”

The woman said she was putting her three-month-old son down for a nap when she realized it was moving. She immediately went to check on its accompanying handheld remote, just to make sure that it wasn’t some sort of malfunction or something or that it hadn’t been accidentally remove from her bedroom. Unfortunately, it was the result of someone on the other end of the camera. “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.”

As scenarios such as these continue to arise, it is becoming increasingly clear that embedded system insecurity affects everyone everywhere. Products can be cloned, software copied, systems tampered with and spied on. What’s more, data security is directly linked to how exposed the cryptographic key is to being accessed by unintended parties, much like the instances mentioned above. The best solution to keeping the “secret key secret” is to lock it in protected hardware devices. That is exactly what these cutting-edge security devices do. As Atmel’s resident security expert Bill Boldt says, “No security? No IoT for you!” Luckily, a new wave of ultra-secure defense mechanisms can thwart off malicious hackers and mitigate future threats.