My home security camera got hacked last month and I found out the hard way

I was just sitting on my couch when I heard a voice come from the camera in my living room. It was some guy just talking nonsense, trying to scare me. I felt my stomach drop. I had bought that camera two years ago because it was cheap and had good reviews, but I never changed the default password it came with. I just plugged it in and forgot about it. I unplugged it right away and spent the next three hours resetting every smart device in my house. It turns out the camera was on a list of known weak devices that bots scan for. Has anyone else had a smart device get taken over, and what did you do to lock things down after?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancy_garcia632mo ago

My old baby monitor got hacked back in 2018 and a stranger started singing lullabies to my kid. I felt like the WORST parent on the planet. After that I put little stickers over every camera lens in the house except my laptop. Now I use those crazy long passwords that look like keyboard smashes and store them in a password app. It is a huge pain but hearing that creepy singing voice was a real wake up call.

susandixon2mo ago

My password manager has a generator for those keyboard smash codes.

patricia_singh819d ago

Oh man, I have to say that password generators are handy but you still have to watch which one you use. @susandixon, they're great for creating random passwords but some of them store your data in ways that aren't super secure. Like the built-in one in my browser used to just save everything in plain text where anyone could see it. I switched to one that encrypts locally on my device instead of on their servers. Better safe than sorry, especially after hearing about your creepy baby monitor story.