Guy Hacks Baby Monitor, Says He's in Baby's Nursery

Family has switched to non-WiFi camera
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 18, 2018 7:00 PM CST
Guy Hacks Baby Monitor, Threatens to Kidnap Baby
Stock photo.   (Getty Images / AndreyPopov)

Nathan and Ellen Rigney were asleep just before midnight Monday when the baby monitor next to their bed started making a beeping noise. Next, the Texas couple started hearing "sexual expletives," which they assumed were coming from inside their 4-month-old son's room. "Then [he] said 'I’m going to kidnap your baby, I’m in your baby’s room,'" Ellen Rigney recounts to Click2Houston. Her husband ran upstairs to find the baby safe—and alone. Then Ellen remembered reading a story about how WiFi cameras can be hacked. They turned off their WiFi and their two Nest WiFi cameras and filed a police report, and are sharing their story so others know this can happen.

The couple says Nest representatives were "no help" and that the company has not apologized. They've replaced the camera network with a non-WiFi camera in the nursery. A security expert tells the station hackers may have accessed the family's original camera network through the app. "If you can access it remotely, chances are someone else can as well," she says. In a statement, Nest says that customers sometimes reuse passwords that had been previously exposed in breaches and notes that "reusing compromised passwords can expose customers to other people using the credentials to log into their Nest account and potentially other websites and services." (Another creepy story about a Nest device made headlines this week.)

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