

"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.
#CLOUD BABY MONITOR SECURITY PASSWORD#
"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.
