Video cameras used to keep kids safe can be hacked to spy on your family
Parents have been looking for ways to keep their kids safe for generations. The thing is, worrying about what they’re up to when they leave the house isn’t enough these days. Now, there are online trolls and predators to watch for.
That’s why you need to be proactive when it comes to protecting your kids in the digital world. Tap or click here for 5 ways to protect your child online.
Sadly, things appear to be getting worse — especially for folks with babies. A popular baby monitor is putting your entire family at risk of being spied on and more.
I spy a hacker
A new report from PCMag gives a dire warning for parents who own a popular baby monitor. Researchers at Bitdefender discovered that hackers are able to exploit flaws in some iBaby monitors and spy on the very children they’re supposed to be protecting.
The problems don’t stop there. Hackers can also retrieve pictures or videos saved to the cloud and even watch live video from your device. Plus, they can steal your personal information associated with the monitor.
But, wait, there’s more. Researchers also learned that anyone who has one of these monitors is able to access videos and pictures saved to the cloud by every other family who owns the same type of monitor. Yikes!
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The device we’re talking about is an iBaby Monitor M6S. It has very good reviews and, up until now, was popular with parents.
Here are some of the key problems discovered by Bitdefender:
- Unrestricted cloud data access – The credentials that should just allow access to one iBaby device’s cloud-stored data can actually be used to enter the iBaby directory, where hackers can access and download all iBaby users’ photo and video recordings from a centralized location.
- Unprotected communication – Hackers can spy on communications between every device’s iBaby smartphone app and the iBaby server by using the credentials of a single iBaby monitor.
- Full remote control – If a hacker monitors the server connecting to an iBaby device during initial setup, they can capture the owner’s information to control the camera remotely and stream or record video from the device, take screenshots and even play music through it.
- Personal information at risk – With iBaby cloud access, hackers can use specific camera ID data to capture other data, such as the owner’s email address, name, location and timestamps when a parent accesses the camera remotely.
Is there anything you can do now?
The standard procedure when security researchers discover a product flaw is to give the manufacturer 90 days to fix it before going public with the information. In this case, Bitdefender told iBaby developers about the vulnerabilities way back in May of 2019.
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That’s much longer than the typical waiting period to come up with a fix and sadly, iBaby didn’t respond. To this day there still hasn’t been a patch to fix the serious flaws.
At this point, the only thing you can do is unplug the device and stop using it. Also, remove any pictures and videos from iBaby’s cloud storage if you don’t want them to be seen by strangers.
If you don’t want to lose those memories, you can store them on a cloud service you can trust, like IDrive.
Save a whopping 90% when you sign up at IDrive.com and use promo code Kim at checkout. That’s less than $7 for your first year!
Tags: cloud storage, digital world, hackers, privacy, reviews, security
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