As if new parents didn’t have enough to
worry about, now they have to worry about hackers taking over their baby
monitors. In August of 2013, Marc
Gilbert, a father in Texas ran to his daughter Allyson’s room when he heard a
voice saying, “Wake up, you little slut”.
When he got to the room, he realized that someone hacked the baby
monitor, took control of the camera and was watching his little girl. When he went to unplug the camera, he watched
as it turned to see what he was doing.
Little Allyson slept through the incident, but Mr. Gilbert made sure
that he had tighter security and firewalls installed on both the monitor and
his Internet.
The baby monitor used by the Gilberts
was made by Foscam and connected to the Internet. This particular monitor was known to have
security issues, but since they didn’t buy the monitor directly from Foscam,
they never received the company’s email regarding an available update that
corrected the problem. As of today,
there are estimated to be another 40,000 monitors that can still be hacked.
Just recently, a hacker found one of
those monitors in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In April 2014, Adam and Heather Schreck
woke up to the sound of someone yelling, “Wake up, baby!”, coming from their 10
month old daughter’s room. The parents
rushed to the room and were horrified when they realized the voice was coming
from their baby monitor! The monitor’s
camera started moving and pointed right at them while the person on the other
end of the monitor continued to yell obscenities at them and the baby.
This could be the same person who hacked the Gilbert’s baby monitor in
Texas or it could be a copycat, but they will never know. In order to remove the threat, the Schrecks
quickly unplugged the baby monitor. Marc
Gilbert also unplugged his daughter’s monitor.
Unfortunately, by doing this, all information stored in the monitor,
including the log of IP addresses that accessed it, are erased, making it
impossible for the police to trace who is responsible.
