Hacker Asks 8-Year-Old Girl “Do You Want To Be My Friend?” Through Ring Camera
A creepy video is making the rounds after a family claims their four-day-old Ring camera was hacked and the person behind the invasion of privacy started communicating with their eight-year-old daughter.
Ashley LeMay bought the Ring camera on a Black Friday deal hoping to stay closer to her three children while she worked overnight shifts as a nurse in DeSoto County, Mississippi. According to WMC5 Action News, within four days, the camera hda been hacked while Ashley was out running errands and her husband was home watching the kids.
The video shows Tiny Tim track ”Tiptoe Through The Tulips” start playing through the speaker. The song’s notorious for its use in scary movie Insidious and includes lyrics like, “Tip-toe through the window / By the window, that is where I’ll be.” When eight-year-old Alyssa asks, “who is that?”, the voice says “I’m your best friend!” Later, “I’m Santa Claus! … You can do whatever you want right now.” The voice offers breaking her TV and trashing her room as two options.
”They could have watched them sleeping, changing. I mean they could have seen all kinds of things,” the mom said. ”Honestly, my gut it makes me feel like it’s either somebody who knows us or somebody who is very close by.”
Ring, for its part, claims that the breach was due to a lack of security on the family’s part and absolutely not related to a Ring data breach.
”Customer trust is important to us, and we take the security of our devices seriously. While we are still investigating this issue and are taking appropriate steps to protect our devices based on our investigation, we are able to confirm this incident is in no way related to a breach or compromise of Ring’s security,” a spokesperson for Ring said.
Ashley LeMay did tell WMC that she had not yet set up two-factor authentication yet for the Ring account and had their wifi as a viewable network. However, this isn’t the first story of a Ring hack that’s made headlines this week. Vice reported a podcast called “NulledCast” that hacks people’s Ring cameras and trolls the owners for listeners’ entertainment. They target these homes based on having an email address and password that’s been previously part of a data breach from another account.
If you’re thinking of buying a Ring camera for added security, it just might do the opposite.