Creepy Weirdos Are Hacking Baby Monitors For Fun, So Everyone Needs To Stop Using The Factory-Default Passwords

night baby monitorA strong password is often all that stands between us and having someone empty our bank accounts, steal our identities, and watch us while we sleep. But still a lot of us are being really bad about practicing basic Internet safety with our passwords. Security experts are always telling us not to use the same password for every site, not to use dumb passwords like “password,” and not to do things like store all our financial information and account passwords on our phones and then leave our phones on the subway. (I know a dude who did that like three times.) But as easy as it is to just leave everything set to the factory defaults, it’s very important to change them, even with innocuous pieces of equipment like baby monitors.

In fact it’s especially important to change the information on the baby monitor, because the Internet is full of jackholes who think it is funny to hack baby monitors and shout creepy stuff at babies. I don’t know why they think that’s fun. Maybe they got all caught up on Game of Thrones episodes and decided that instead of playing video games like a normal person, they would just start pranking babies.

This week in Indianapolis a set of new parents were extremely creeped out when some random Internet weirdo decided to hack their baby monitor. According to Fox59, the Denmans were playing with their 2-year-old daughter when someone started playing music through their baby monitor.

“Someone was playing ”˜Every Breath You Take’ by The Police,” said Jared Denman.

Admittedly, I would have thought playing a song with a chorus like, “I’ll be watching you” through someone’s baby monitor was utterly hilarious when I was like 14. The Denmans, of course, were not amused. Especially when the hacker decided that playing creepy music wasn’t getting enough of a rise out of them and started making sexual noises at them through the monitor.

There is apparently a whole community of baby monitor hackers who think it is funny to play “Every Breath You Take” through the monitors of unsuspecting parents and then post the videos online. This is a dumb and creepy hobby, especially since it isn’t even hard to “hack” a baby monitor, because most of the hackers are getting access to the monitors by using the factory-default usernames and passwords, which the parents have not bothered to change.

Luckily, that means it is pretty damn easy to dramatically reduce the risks of some creeper on the Internet watching your baby sleep. Just change the default username and password. You could probably even change the password to “Password” and be more protected than you would be if you were using the factory defaults, but it’s probably a good idea to come up with something a smidge more creative. just for the sake of peace of mind.

 

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