Well, this is horrifying. The whole point in installing security cameras is to protect your kids against intruders — but what do you do when the intruder is inside the camera??
That’s the nightmare parents in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi have been dealing with for the past several days.
Multiple families have reported hacks into their Ring security cameras, invading their homes through the intercom system and speaking to their children. Parents have reported racial slurs, threats, false alarms, even a bizarre ransom demand coming from disembodied voices in their cameras.
Related: 5-Year-Old Carried Toddler A Half Mile After They Were Abandoned In Snow
Ashley Lemay, a mom from Mississippi, was willing to share her horror story — and the chilling security footage of her daughter confronting the man in the camera.
Lemay had only purchased her security camera four days prior when poor 8-year-old Alyssa heard music coming from her bedroom. She searched all over for the source of the song — Tiny Tim‘s novelty hit Tiptoe Through The Tulips, which horror movie fans will recognize from its second life as the demonic theme from the Insidious films.
Finally the music stopped, and a voice came seemingly from nowhere asking her to be friends. The male voice told her:
“I’m your best friend. I’m Santa Claus.”
He then encouraged her to go wild and “mess up” her room or break her TV.
Alyssa told GMA of the experience:
“I was even scared of my room for a few days. I’m still a little bit scared of it.”
You can see the footage of poor Alyssa — if you can stomach it — at about 33 seconds in to this report.
The scariest part of all this?
It’s not just the hackers’ voices getting in, which would be bad enough. They’re also seeing through these cameras.
We’re more scared of the hackers who decided not to make their presences known to the children they were watching…
Ring tried to assuage customers’ concerns, releasing a statement saying:
“Customer trust is important to us and we take the security of our devices seriously. Our security team has investigated this incident and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network.
Recently, we were made aware of an incident where malicious actors obtained some Ring users’ account credentials (e.g., username and password) from a separate, external, non-Ring service and reused them to log in to some Ring accounts. Unfortunately, when the same username and password is reused on multiple services, it’s possible for bad actors to gain access to many accounts.
Upon learning of the incident, we took appropriate actions to promptly block bad actors from known affected Ring accounts and affected users have been contacted.”
Known affected Ring accounts.
We don’t just want to scare you, but think about that. What about the ones where the hackers are keeping quiet??
*shudder*
If you have a Ring camera, might be worth getting it checked out just in case.
[Image via ABC News/YouTube.]
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