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Hacker talks to 3-year-old boy over baby monitor, freaks everyone out

Baby monitor

This is not the first time we’ve heard a story like this, but it still creeps us out.

A Washington couple’s three-year-old son recently complained of a strange voice in his room.

“For months, my son was telling his family that the ‘telephone’ was telling him to stay in bed,” the mother wrote to KIRO 7.

And then the parents heard it themselves.

“Wake up, little boy. Daddy’s looking for you,” a man’s voice said over the baby monitor.

Later, the boy’s parents heard the voice talking about them — and saw the camera moving around on its own.

“My wife walked in and I heard the exact words, ‘Look someone’s coming, or someone’s coming into view,'” the father told CBS New York.

The terrified parents, who have asked to remain anonymous for fear that their privacy will be compromised even more, believe the device — which includes a camera, connects to the Internet and includes a smartphone app for remote checking-in — was hacked by a total stranger who figured out how to watch their son and spy on their family.

Foscam, the company that sold the monitor to the family, admitted that it is possible for someone to remotely control the device, although it couldn’t track down who or from where.

Mashable Chief Correspondent Lance Ulanoff is urging parents to change the default password that comes with these monitors to ones that are more unique and harder to guess.

“If somebody else has your login information, they can go to that same app, and log into your webcam, which is what happened here,” Ulanoff said.

Baby-monitor hacking on the rise

Earlier this month, a Rochester, Minnesota, family found footage of their nursery online.

Their nanny cam started playing music in the middle of the night, and then shutting itself off when either of the parents entered the room. They would turn the camera to face the wall, but a few hours later it would be facing the closet.

So they started to investigate.

“We were able to track down the IP address through the Foscam software, and found out that it was coming from Amsterdam,” the anonymous mother of one told KTTC. “That IP had a web link attached to it.”

What they then found was disturbing: thousands of photos of rooms, taken by nanny cams like their own, posted online.

“There’s at least fifteen different countries listed and it’s not just nurseries — it’s people’s living rooms, their bedrooms, their kitchens,” the mom said. “Every place that people think is sacred and private in their home is being accessed.”

The family has since ditched the cameras and are choosing to check on their little one “the old-fashioned way.” They are also recommending that families choose tricky passwords — and change them often.

Last spring, a hacker woke up a baby by screaming at her over the monitor.

“Wake up, baby. Wake up, baby,” a man’s voice yelled over a monitor into an Ohio nursery before screaming obscenities at a 10-month-old girl.

“What scares me even more is that if this person hadn’t been screaming at my daughter I would not have known that he was even looking at her,” concerned mom Heather Schreck told CTVNews.ca at the time.

“So I have no way of knowing if he’s done it before, how often, listened in on conversations between my husband and I in the house. (It’s) just a real sense of violation that someone just walked into our life and (we) didn’t even know it.”

The Schrecks continued to use the baby monitor, but were committed to changing their passwords regularly and were careful to look for signs of another privacy violation.

Sometimes the baby-monitor company itself can help fight against hackers by providing firmware updates if a product proves vulnerable to being compromised.

One hacking incident, which took place in Houston in 2013, could have been prevented if the family had received a much-needed firmware update from Foscam. Because they purchased their monitor from a reseller, however, they were unaware of the update until after a stranger told their daughter to “wake up, you little slut.”

Before the Foscam security update, up to 40,000 monitors were vulnerable to hacking.

Parents of young ones, how often do you change your baby-monitor password?