A little girl was left horribly terrified after someone hacked her bedroom camera and asked: “Don’t you want to be my best friend?”
The incident frightened the whole family as they realized that the camera they used to monitor their kids was also accessible to a stranger.
The family had set up the Ring security camera in eight-year-old Alyssa LeMay’s room just four days before the incident.
In the camera footage, little Alyssa can be heard saying: “Who is that?” to which the man replies: “I’m your best friend.”
Alyssa got badly scared and shouted for her mother. The man carried on and said: “I’m Santa Claus. Don’t you want to be my best friend?”
He added: “You can mess up your room. You can break your TV. You can do whatever you want.”
Narrating the incident to WMC-TV, the little girl said: “I was in the hallway and thought it was my sister because I hear music. It’s like ‘tiptoe through the window.’
“So I come upstairs and I hear some banging noise and I am like ‘who is that.’”
Alyssa’s mom Ashley LeMay was greatly worried that a stranger had been seeing her daughters doing everything. She said: “They could have watched them sleeping, changing.
“I mean they could have seen all kinds of things. Honestly, my gut it makes me feel like it’s either somebody who knows us or somebody who is very close by.”
The family quickly removed the camera and contacted the company that provided it.
A spokesperson for the company said: “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.”
Ashley later realized that she hadn’t done the two-factor authentication that was required for the account to make it immune against unauthorized access.
The company’s spokesperson clarified: “Due to the fact that customers often use the same username and password for their various accounts and subscriptions, bad actors often re-use credentials stolen or leaked from one service on other services.”
Explaining the company’s system to avoid security breaches, he said: “As a precaution, we highly and openly encourage all Ring users to enable two-factor authentication on their Ring account, add Shared Users (instead of sharing login credentials), use strong passwords, and regularly change their passwords.”
Replaced!