Baby monitors are ubiquitous in homes with babies and small children. These devices allow parents to see what’s going on inside their children’s rooms when the parents aren’t physically there.
Unfortunately, baby monitors also are allowing strangers to peer inside private homes.
ABC2 News reported that arents Heather & Adam Schreck heard a man’s voice in their 10-month-old daughter’s bedroom. They told the station’s reporter that they thought someone had broken into their home.
Frightened, they scurried to the nursery, only to find it was a “virtual intruder.” Someone had hacked into their baby monitor, which was connected to the Internet.
Joseph Carrigan, of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, explained how they did it.
Carrigan says, “These are network accessible IP [baby monitors] and can connect to the local area network. We don’t know if they’re exploiting a weak security.”
The whole story is here.