Baby Monitor Hacked: Hacker Calls 2-year old Girl Explicit Things
A man has hacked into a baby monitor at a Texas home earlier this week. According to reports, the hacker called the two-year-old lewd and offensive names through the device.
On August 10 at their home in Texas, a strange voice came out of Marc Gilbert's daughter's room, says ABC News. Gilbert was washing dishes after his birthday dinner when he and his wife Lauren heard a male voice of British or European accent coming from their daughter's baby monitor. 2-year-old Allyson was peacefully sleeping in her room while being called to wake up by the hacker.
According to CBS News, the hacker used the device to curse and say sexually explicit things to the sleeping girl, even calling her by her name. The hacker reportedly saw the girl's name posted above her bed through the baby monitor's camera. The male voice also called Allyson an "effing moron" and addressed her as a "little slut" says ABC News. Thankfully, Allyson was fast asleep all throughout the unfortunate incident. According to Gilbert, her daughter was born deaf and needed her cochlear implant to hear. That night, the girl was not wearing the implant to sleep.
The couple was not spared from lewd name-calling with Marc being called a "stupid moron" and his wife Lauren a "bi***."
"At that point I ran over and disconnected it and tried to figure out what happened. I couldn't see the guy. All you could do was hear his voice and that he was controlling the camera," Gilbert told ABC News.
The Gilberts were using a Foscam wireless camera as a baby monitor, says Forbes. According to Foscam's official website, the wireless camera "features high quality video and audio, pan/tilt, remote internet viewing making it viewable over the internet using standard browsers, motion detection, night vision, embedded IR-Cut filter as well as a built in network video recording system." The device is also compatible with smartphones (iPhone, Android and Blackberry).
"The router was password protected and the firewall was enabled. The IP camera was also password protected," says Gilbert in the comments section on an ABC local news report on the incident.
"In this case, what it sounds like is that they set this camera up, and someone cracked into the wireless network," Dave Chronister, the Managing Partner of Parameters Security told CBS News. Chronister suggests using Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) to ensure better encryption standards. He also suggests setting a strong password to prevent incidents of hacking. "Make sure you punch in a password and make sure it's long," he added.