Hacker targets baby monitor and tells child to ‘wake up, wake up’

Waking her partner, she became even more alarmed when she heard the voice speaking through the baby monitor shouting “wake up baby, wake up baby” according to Ms Schreck.“About the time I saw it moving, I also heard a voice again start screaming at my daughter. He was screaming ‘wake up baby, wake up baby’.” she said.

Both occupants of the house were deeply disturbed with Mr Schreck saying “You kind of do feel violated in a way”and his partner alarmed by how the intruder had been able to communicate with her child, adding“I was just absolutely shocked to see that somebody could get into my house so easily.”

The hackers attacked as the baby monitors are internet connected to facilitate the streaming of the feed to any online device, including the phone that Ms Schreck used to first realize that the device had been hacked. Dave Hatter of Infinity Partners, the internet security experts who are investigating the incident, said“It’s not just that they want to get in and mess with your camera. More sophisticated hackers know they can use this as a launching off point to get into your network and potentially steal your identity, or use your network to launch malicious attacks against something else.”

Incidents such as this are severely hampering the concept of the “Internet of Things” where all mundane objects are connected to the Internet — enabling fridges to automatically order more milk or lights to turn on when you arrive home — as consumer confidence in the safety of the internet is decreased through fears of issues such as the recent revelations concerning the NSA’s snooping on the browsing habits of millions of Americans, the recent critical Heartbleed bug in the OpenSSL system that powers numerous online payment systems and through incidents like this which are worryingly increasing in frequency — this is the second such incident recently as Marc Gilbert’s internet-connected baby monitors in Houston were also hacked in a similar way earlier this month.