Hackers go after new baby monitors

Wi-Fi-enabled systems vulnerable to takeovers

At first, it was a beeping that woke Ellen and Nathan Rigney in the middle of the night. Then it became something more sinister.

A stranger’s voice, spouting “sexual expletives,” wafted through a baby monitor in the Texas couple’s room — one that was linked to a Nest camera in their infant’s room upstairs, according to KRPC News.

Alarmed, the Rigneys turned on their lights. Unprompted, a Nest camera in their room activated and the same man’s voice told them to turn the lights back off.

“I’m going to kidnap your baby,” the voice said next, Ellen Rigney recalled to the news station. “I’m in your baby’s room.”

Nathan Rigney bolted upstairs to his son’s crib.

But the 4-month-old was fast asleep, oblivious to the unsettling incident that had spooked his parents. There was no one else in his room.

That’s when the Rigneys realized they had been hacked — and set about shutting down their cameras and Wi-Fi, as well as calling the police.

“I didn’t know what to think. It’s a voice that I’ll never forget,” Ellen Rigney told KRPC News. “You have something that’s supposed to make you feel better and instead it makes you feel the opposite. It makes you feel invaded and uncomfortable.”

Unlike the range-limited baby monitors of yore, Wi-Fi-enabled baby monitors allow parents to keep tabs on a child from anywhere they have a WiFi connection.

But the Rigneys aren’t the only ones who have found that these snazzier baby monitors and camera systems are vulnerable to being hacked.

In June, a South Carolina couple claimed that the lens on their baby monitor camera started moving on its own and suspected that a hacker had taken over.

In 2015, a couple told CBS Minnesota that they found pictures of their baby on a website for images obtained from hacked cameras.

Earlier this month, a man who identified himself as a “security researcher” from Canada hacked into a Nest security camera in Phoenix, according to the Arizona Republic.

The problem isn’t limited to baby monitors. Nest cams are home security cameras that many parents have adapted as baby-monitoring devices. In truth, any home device connected to the internet can be hacked — from printers to “smart” refrigerators to thermostats.

A Nest representative told The Washington Post that the company could not address specific cases, but urged all customers to use two-factor verification.

In addition, Nest has reset all accounts where customers had reused passwords previously exposed through breaches on other websites, the company said.

“These customers were vulnerable because their credentials were freely available on the internet,” the company stated.