People Are Hacking Baby Monitors To Terrify Infants, Families

Is somebody checking out the baby besides
mom, dad and the bsbysitter? Baby monitors
might not be very secure. 

Now this is scary.

It turns out baby monitors are often incredibly easy to hack, and a lot of people know this.

It also turns out there are a number of sickos out there who like to terrorize babies - and their families.

A married couple, identified only as Jay and Sarah, said their three year old kid kept saying he was scared to go to sleep at night because the "phone" kept talking to them, said television station KDVR in Denver. 

Jay and Sarah could NOT figure out what was going on with their boy until Sarah walked by the baby monitor and heard a stranger's voice coming out of it.

The voice said, "Look out little boy, daddy's looking for you," KDVR reported. 

When Sarah walked into the room, the camera's night vision lens turned to examine her and the voice added, "Look, someone's coming into view."

This wasn't an isolated case. A Minnesota family learned their baby monitor had been hacked when they found photos of their baby online, probably taken via the monitor from somebody controlling it remotely.

Foscam, the company that made Jay and Sarah's baby monitor, said it might have been hacked and controlled by someone using a smartphone app or laptop.

Obviously, this whole thing freaked out Jay and Sarah enough to take a lot of safety measures around their house, because who knows what the hackers were really up to.

Last year, when a security firm named Rapid 7 tested nine widely available Internet connected baby monitors and found security on all of them lacking, reportedWired magazine.

Says Wired:

"'Eight of the nine cameras got an F and one got a D minus,' security researcher Mark Stanislav told Fusion's Kashmir Hill. Security flaws included issues such as lack of encryption, the use of default passwords, and access to Internet portals with the device's serial number or account number. Rapid 7 disclosed the vulnerabilities to the companies, who will hopefully all take the information to heart."

Yeah, we hope they did.

It's probably better at this point to go back to the old fashioned way and going in yourself to check on Baby John Or Baby Sue, rather than glancing at the baby monitor.

Because maybe a lot of other people are glancing at it, too.

No Zombies in Montana, but Why Was There an Emergency Alert For Them?

People are still chortling over the Emergency Alert System broadcast on a Montana television station last week warning that zombies had risen from the dead and were menacing the good citizens of Big Sky country.

Zombies like these did not attack the good citizens
of Montana last week, despite an errant warning.

Somebody hacked into television station KRTV in Great Falls and activated the alert system. So viewers heard that familiar emergerncy tone, GRARRNK! GARRNNK!, followed by the mechanical sounding voice describing the emergency and the crawl across the bottom the screen putting the crisis into words.

Apparently, a few stations in Michigan were hacked by what was reportedly some overseas prankster who wanted to alert us if the faux zombie attack.

Zombies? Really? Aren't zombies becoming something of a cliche? Zombie attacks have become as tired a trope as the stereotype of the obnoxious drunk at a party dancing around with a lampshade on his head.

Time for something original, pranksters!

On a more serious note, why was it so easy to hack into the Emergency Alert System? It's meant for true emergencies. Say a tornado is heading straight for your town or a train derailed nearby and is threatening to overwhelm you with toxic fumes. The EAS is supposed to tell you about these things so you can either protect yourself or kiss your sorry ass goodbye.

Here's my paranoia again, but what if somebody with more ill intent than the Zombie jerks hack into the EAS and prompt a legitimate sounding, but fake alert? Maybe just to instill panic, or as a diversion for some other nasty crime?

And what if people stop trusting the EAS, and when there's a legitimate warning, people just shrug and ignore the oncoming danger, because the EAS just says things for fun, right?

I'm sure the Powers That Be are trying to figure out how the hackers got in, but even if they plug that hole, those wily hackers will surely find some other way to exploit the system, or any computerized system for fun or profit.

I guess we all have to fine tune our bullcrap meters so we can tell truth from fiction.