If you are adding technology to your home network for convenience or safety, you could be putting yourself and your family at risk. While this diary talks about a certain brand, this could happen to you and your family with any home technology. In fact, the FBI just issued a warning, which I discuss below. Also, I have some tips at the bottom to help protect you and your family.
Here is a chilling story that happened last week:
When Alyssa LeMay heard the strange music and sounds coming from her bedroom, she walked in expecting to find one of her sisters. But the room was empty.
Then, as the 8-year-old wandered around her room alone, the mysterious song abruptly stopped.
“Hello there,” a man’s voice said.
It wasn’t Alyssa’s father, who was elsewhere inside the family’s Mississippi home. The voice belonged to a stranger. And not only could the faceless man speak to the young girl — he could see her.
In a chilling exchange caught on video last week, the LeMays say the man was able to interact with their daughter after hacking into a Ring security camera that had recently been installed in the bedroom shared by Alyssa and her two younger sisters. Over the course of several minutes, the man repeatedly directed a racial slur at Alyssa and tried to persuade her to misbehave, according to a copy of the video obtained by The Washington Post.
It’s important to note that Alyssa is white.
Trust was a major factor in Ashley LeMay’s decision to buy Ring cameras for her home. For two years, the 27-year-old mother of four said she talked herself out of getting indoor security cameras, citing potential privacy breaches as one of her concerns. That changed when she saw that a majority of people in her neighborhood in a small northern Mississippi town had outfitted their homes with Ring doorbells. LeMay’s friend, a fellow mother, also recommended the indoor camera to her.
LeMay bought 2 cameras and installed one in her infant’s room and another in her daughters’ bedroom.
For LeMay, who works overnight at a hospital as a laboratory scientist, the cameras not only gave her “peace of mind” but also helped her children feel safe.
The details of the hacker’s nightmare-ish conversation with the child are explained in the article, so I won’t post them here.
After the child went to tell her dad what happened, he went to the child’s bedroom, texted his wife immediately and unplugged the camera.
The children are now terrified and won’t sleep in their bedroom.
As for LeMay,
The company’s responses, she said, left her frustrated. Instead of answering her questions about whether the hack was done locally or by someone far away, LeMay said, a Ring representative repeatedly brought up how she didn’t set up two-factor authentication as an added security measure.
Other nightmare-ish incidents are detailed in the article, one with racist comments.
While the article dealt with Ring camera hacking, any home network device can possibly be hacked to spy on you.
Can You Stop the Spying?
The
FBI has issued a warning that your technology may be spying on you, through various devices, including your smart TV.
The FBI recommends placing black tape over an unused smart TV camera, keeping your smart TV up-to-date with the latest patches and fixes, and to read the privacy policy to better understand what your smart TV is capable of.
As convenient as it might be, the most secure smart TV might be one that isn’t connected to the internet at all.
Regarding smart phones, the Inc. website article says, “Snowden director, Oliver Stone, has created an anti-smartphone PSA to accompany the feature film.”
Edward Snowden, the famous whistleblower and the subject of Stone's film, has long maintained that smartphones strip us of all privacy. US government bodies such as his former employer the National Security Agency, foreign powers, both allies and enemies, and even hackers can gain control of ordinary citizens' smartphones by simply sending an encrypted text. He told the BBC that the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters had both invested "heavily" in smartphone tracking technology. They can turn on a phone when it's off and then use its microphone to listen in and its camera to watch what's going on around the phone.
What Can We Do to Protect Ourselves?
Besides what is listed above, the Inc. article says of smart phones,
Snowden, in partnership with a hardware expert, has proposed a specially-designed smartphone case that would alert the phone's owner to "unusual activity." (Here's a full description of the spy-blocking phone case.)
But all that will do is alert you to possible spying, not prevent it. If you want to completely avoid being eavesdropped on via your smartphone, one of your only options is to use a Faraday Box which blocks the radio signals smartphones and most other devices use to communicate. Of course, you won't actually be able to use the phone unless you take it out of the box.
You could go back to using land lines--which of course can also allow eavesdropping, and pinpoint your location even more accurately than smartphones do. Or, you could do what most of us will likely do and ignore Stone's and Snowden's warnings. And hope that no one out there really cares about anything we have to say.
If you are adding technology, do be careful about including it in your home, phone, computer, etc. Only add technology to your network that you absolutely have to. Each device and app could be a portal for hackers.
Change default passwords, use strong passwords, set up two-factor authentication, and keep your apps up to date. If you aren’t using apps, delete them.
Old technology that is no longer supported by official updates should be replaced.
By the way, data collected on people around the world, is the “new oil,” which refers to the very corrupt and destructive oil and gas industry that Rachel Maddow details in her new book Blowout.