Is the home security camera that you have in your home safe? How about your baby monitor? If you think that these things are secure because they came with a secure password, you might be very sadly mistaken.
A Russian website has recently published live streams for hundreds of thousands of baby monitors and home security cameras. This stream can be seen by anyone that accesses the site, and it proves that most home tech really isn’t secure at all. Here’s how it happens.
A Quick and Simple Security Breach
Most baby monitors and home security cameras come with passwords that are supposed to be secure, but a lot of them are no more complicated than “12345.” Further, those passwords are strewn throughout user manuals, and most users never bother to change the passwords.
All a person needs to do in order to see what’s happening in a crib, home, or business it to log into a security site using those known passwords, which only takes a few tries in most cases. From there, live video footage of people, babies, and businesses can be quickly seen.
Major Brands Impacted
Surprisingly, most major baby monitor and home security cameras are impacted by this breach. Brands like Panasonic, Linksys, and Foscam were all found to have easily accessible passwords. If this sounds like something you should be aware of, well, you should. Every piece of home equipment that comes with a password should be changed as fast as possible, and all passwords should be hard to decipher.
If a thief watches a home or business using a password and by finding cached pages on the web (Google caches pages from security cameras just like any other page), it’s like giving that thieve a map to when you are and aren’t home. The further worry here is baby kidnapping, which can simply happen when a baby can be watched by a stranger through the internet.
What Can Be Done
This solution to this problem is to simply change your password, but don’t make it one that’s really easy to remember. Instead, use a password keeper that can remember your password, but also scramble a password so that it is really hard to figure out. You can store this password using a keeper, and no thief or voyeur will be able to hack into any camera or monitor that you own.
The problem is that most people (hundreds of thousands of them, in fact) do not bother to change a password. The mentality is that nobody would bother looking at a baby through a monitor, but that’s not the case. Not changing a password on something as simple as a baby monitor is really a bad idea, as can clearly be seen here. What about that Russian website that is streaming content from homes?
Keeping It Safe
At the time of this writing, the website in question has not been shut down, and it may not be. To protect your family or business, change your password right now, and make it a really hard one to figure out.