Mom Learns Someone Hacked Into Her Son's Baby Monitor And Has Been Talking To Him During The Night
At first, her son thought it was her and her husband speaking to him through the monitor, but quickly realized that it was actually a stranger.
TikTok A mother has warned other parents after a frightening incident happened with her son's baby monitor.
In a video, TikTok user Kurin Adele shared that she had experienced every parent's worst nightmare after her three-year-old son informed both her and her husband that something very wrong was happening to him during the night, and it was all because of his monitor.
Kurin explained that someone had hacked into her son's monitor and was speaking to him during the night.
For her three-year-old son, Kurin had been using the Owlet baby monitor after a previous monitor had broken. While she had been having no issues with the monitor since installing it in both her son's and daughter's rooms, things quickly took a turn for the worse.
"So, last night my son woke up about two hours after we put him to bed because he had taken off his diaper and peed all over his bed," Kurin said. "We began cleaning him up and I have noticed that over the past couple of weeks to a couple of months, he's been unplugging his camera."
While putting her son back to sleep, Kurin had asked her husband to plug back in the baby monitor. However, before he could do that, their son began hysterically crying and freaking out, pleading with his parents not to plug the camera back in because someone had been talking to him during the night.
Immediately, Kurin and her husband are spooked by their son's revelation, especially since neither of them speaks to their son through his baby monitor camera. "Me and my husband looked at each other completely terrified, and we reassured him that we would not be plugging his camera in [and] that he was safe."
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Kurin and her husband went to change the monitor's password right away.
As soon as Kurin learned that her son's monitor camera had been hacked, she and her husband went to change the password and found that their previous password had been leaked in a data breach.
"We go to change the Owlet password in our Owelet app because we have two cameras, one in my daughter's room and one in my son's room. As soon as we changed the password, this is the notification we get."
From a screenshot of the message, it read, "This password has appeared in a data leak, which puts this account at high risk of being compromised. You should change your password immediately."
Kurin pointed out that she has no idea how long someone has had access to their password and has been speaking with their son through the Wi-Fi camera on his monitor. She also found it strange that Owlet never notified them about the data leak.
"The only reason we didn't know about this sooner is because our son thought it was us talking to him," she said. "Whoever was talking to him was telling him that it was his mom and dad."
Now, Kurin has sworn off using Wi-Fi cameras in baby monitors, for fear that something like this could easily happen again. "If you are able to, get rid of your Wi-Fi cameras because there have been data breaches and people are hacking into baby monitors left and right," she warned other parents.
However, representatives for Owlet claim there was no suspicious activity. In a statement, the camera company wrote: "We’ve been in contact directly with the customer since Friday, May 5th and have concluded our investigation into this reported incident. Our team has reviewed all available data on our end including firmware, mobile, and server logs and we are very confident that there was no suspicious activity."
All access to the customer's cameras came from the devices owned by the family, and we have no reason to believe there was improper access by external IP addresses based upon our review. Further, Owlet has zero confirmed cases of our cameras being compromised, nor have we identified any failure in our security protocols. "
"We encourage all customers to be vigilant and use password best practices with all devices. Any customer’s online profile can be vulnerable if a user has not set up an appropriately secure password or if they are using the same password across multiple accounts. We encourage users to change their passwords regularly and, if they receive a pop-up from iOS or Android about a potential data leak, to change their password(s) immediately," the statement concluded.
Baby monitors being hacked has been something experts have consistently alerted parents about for several years now. In 2015, the security analytics company Rapid7 published a case study, via NPR, of baby monitors that found several security vulnerabilities.
Not only are hackers able to gain access to these monitors, but they can also use them to access a home's main network and gain information on people's personal computers, and even have access to their financial information.
Some ways to protect against hackers, especially when it comes to baby monitor cameras, is to use a strong password and never use the same one for all accounts. As well as always using two-factor verification.
Nia Tipton is a Brooklyn-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.