Johannesburg - Anyone can see a child over the video camera in a wireless baby monitor while the parents are unaware of what the voyeur is up to.
This is according to a security expert in the wake of news of a Houston, Texas, couple who were horrified when their toddler’s baby monitor was taken over by a hacker .
Marc Gilbert said he was doing the dishes when he heard strange sounds coming from two-year-old Allyson’s bedroom.
He discovered the noises were coming from the baby monitor as a stranger’s voice called his sleeping daughter a “f****** moron” and “little slut”.
The Daily Mail reports that the virtual intruder knew Allyson by name because it was written just above her head, on the wall over where she dozed.
The hacker then yelled at Gilbert and his wife, using expletives in what they described as a “British or European accent”.
“He said: ‘Wake up Allyson, you little slut,’” Gilbert said.
Allyson is deaf, so she didn’t hear him. Then things became even creepier.
“I (saw) the camera move on us,” Gilbert said.
“At that point I ran over and disconnected it and tried to figure out what happened,” Gilbert told ABC News.
Gilbert did his research and now believes his home internet router was hacked and the monitor was accessed.
“(I) couldn’t see the guy. All you could do was hear his voice and he was controlling the camera,” he said, adding:
“It felt like somebody broke into our house.”
Even worse, the Gilberts wonder if the hacking might have occurred in the past.
“It’s quite possible that this had been going on more than one day,” he said. “Security vulnerabilities exist.”
Gilbert said he took all the typical security precautions to keep prying eyes out of his home.
“The router was password-protected and the firewall was enabled,” he wrote in the comments section of the KTRK report.
“The IP camera was also password-protected.”
Jacques van Heerden, the chief executive of Global Technology Security Provider, said there were only 13 wi-fi channels in South Africa, and to steal someone’s network was “very easy” because you only needed to be in the vicinity of a wi-fi network to get the encrypted password that went between a wi-fi device and the router.
Once hackers had this key, they only needed to pay $10 (R98) to have the encryption broken.
Shelly Short, the owner of Baby Sense in South Africa, said they didn’t stock any baby monitors with sound or video because of the dangers surrounding them.
“Most of these monitors work on a radio frequency and people had problems with them, people were picking up other sounds,” Short said. “We did have some about five or six years ago but we stopped stocking them until the technology was improved,” she said, adding that they now only stocked breathing monitors.
Izabella Gates, the managing director of Life Talk, a forum for parents on child safety issues, added that cameras were also being used for other deviant purposes.
“Some teenagers use them to take compromising photos of people they are trying to bully,” Gates said. “Technology is something that people really need to keep their eyes on; if they’re used in the wrong way they can have devastating consequences.”
ABC News tested how dangerous these monitors could be.
The US news team drove around a suburb with a monitor that picked up the frequencies that the wireless cameras worked on and their findings were shocking.
They could see several babies either playing or sleeping in their cribs and occasionally parents walking in and out of the rooms.
One mother told ABC News that this worried her because she may not be fully dressed when walking around the house. - The Star