
"The fact that there are still no standards around this is a little depressing," he says.
Cloud baby monitor factory password#
And always, always change the username and password from the factory setting, he says.īeardsley also says it is disheartening that years after his company's report, baby monitors that appear to have easily fixed vulnerabilities are still on the market. (Paradoxically, he wouldn't recommend products that have never had a reported problem - they've never been tested, he says.) He recommends Nest as one option. If you absolutely want one that can be used over the Internet, he recommends looking for a product with a good track record of fixing security problems.
Cloud baby monitor factory cracked#
She's gone old-fashioned - she's leaving the bedroom door cracked open.īeardsley suggests that parents who want a baby monitor opt for less sophisticated versions that don't connect to the Internet and use radio technology instead. (The company has not responded to NPR's request for comment either.)Īs for what's next? Summitt is not getting a new baby monitor. (The North Charleston Police Department says it can't confirm the details of their conversation without a report.) She has attempted to contact the manufacturer, FREDI, with no luck. It's not common knowledge."Īfter the unnerving incident, a police officer visited their house, she says, but she didn't file a report. "When I was making my baby registry, nobody warned me - no other mom said anything. "I would have never, ever bought something if I thought it was this easy of a security risk," she told NPR. Summitt, for her part, has been frustrated by the number of people who say she should have known about the risks.

But he knows that's not much comfort for people who find themselves watched by a prurient hacker. They're more likely to target the computer inside the camera, or the network it's on. That said, he notes that most hackers are not sitting around watching babies sleep - "It's not super high-value," as he puts it.

There are people who sweep the Internet looking for unsecured cameras, like cameras that still use the factory setting username and password, just to see what's on them. "It sounds like she did all the right things," Beardsley says.Ī family doesn't have to be targeted specifically to have a stranger peering inside its house, at least briefly, he says. "Hackers that I know and hang out with refer to Internet of things hacking as 'hacking on easy mode,' or 'hacking like it's 1998,' " Beardsley says.Įven a user like Jamie Summitt - who changed the password to a unique password she didn't use anywhere else - could be vulnerable. Basically, they're missing safeguards that are built into most modern computers. "We found that there were, pretty much across the board, some pretty easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities - things that have been already solved in mainstream computing," he says, and don't show up often in modern laptops or smartphones.īaby monitors might, for instance, reset to factory defaults without warning users, Beardsley says, or allow for authentication to be bypassed.

In fact, Kevin said he hadn't touched the app all day, which made Jamie remember the incident that morning with unease. This time, everyone who uses the app was together - and they weren't controlling the device. The camera paused on the empty bed, then moved back to the bassinet. It was pointing to the spot where she breastfed her son, Noah, several times a day.

"I looked over on my phone and saw that it was slowly panning over across the room to where our bed was and stopped," Summitt tells NPR. That night, as the family ate dinner and the baby slept, her smartphone alerted her that the camera was being moved again. But she assumed it was her husband, Kevin, checking in on her from work using the smartphone app that controls the camera. Yes, it had moved since the South Carolina stay-at-home mom fell asleep. When Jamie Summitt woke up one Wednesday morning and saw the baby video monitor pointed right at her, she wasn't worried. Jamie Summitt, shown holding her infant son, Noah, was alarmed when she noticed her baby video monitor moving without anyone in the family controlling it.
