8-year-old girl's room security camera gets hacked as creepy voice taunts her, asks her to be his 'best friend'
In a terrifying incident, hackers reportedly accessed a Ring camera connected to an 8-year-old girl's bedroom in Mississippi after it had been mounted for four days - and the incident was caught on video.
Ashley LeMay had bought the Ring camera for her daughter's bedroom after receiving a recommendation from another mother during a Black Friday sale, WMC 5 reported. "I did a lot of research on these before I got them. You know, I really felt like it was safe," LeMay said adding that it was a way for her to stay connected to her daughter while she is away working night shifts as a nurse. "She had one," LeMay said speaking of the time she came across the Ring camera, "and she was like watching her kids on her phone and I was like ‘oh you can actually speak to them. That’s really neat',” said LeMay.
However, the convenience soon turned into a nightmare, after strange music started coming out of the camera and a man urged her daughter to be destructive. 8-year-old Alyssa first heard the music. "First, what happened I was in the hallway I thought it was my sister because I hear music. It’s like ‘tiptoe through the window.’ So I come upstairs and I hear some banging noise and I am like ‘who is that’,” the daughter said.
The voice on the other side reportedly said, "I'm your best friend!" and "I'm Santa Claus, don't you want to be my best friend?"
When the recording was played back, her parents discovered the encounter their daughter had had with the man watching her room. "I watched the video and I mean my heart just like... I didn’t even get to the end where she is screaming ‘mommy, mommy’ before I like ran inside,” said LeMay, "They could have watched them sleeping, changing. I mean they could have seen all kinds of things,” she said. “Honestly, my gut it makes me feel like it’s either somebody who knows us or somebody who is very close by.”
The camera now sits on the counter disconnected, waiting to be returned.
The father had been watching Alyssa and had stepped out to run an errand. The man had urged the girl to be "destructive" before he came home. The camera is now disconnected and LeMay plans to return it.
Ring, in a statement, said that it wasn't because of a breach in security in the camera or Ring's security. "Due to the fact that customers often use the same username and password for their various accounts and subscriptions, bad actors often re-use credentials stolen or leaked from one service on other services. As a precaution, we highly and openly encourage all Ring users to enable two-factor authentication on their Ring account, add Shared Users (instead of sharing login credentials), use strong passwords, and regularly change their passwords." They also said that they are investigating the matter.
The mother did admit that she had not set up the two-factor authentication for the Ring account, an added security measure to avoid hackers. In another incident, a woman was asked to pay a Bitcoin ransom or be "terminated" by hackers on the Ring camera, WFAA reported.