BERRIEN CO., Ga. – Yesterday morning, Thursday, December 12, at 6:18 a.m., a woman was awakened to the sound of the siren from their exterior Ring floodlight camera.
Valdosta Today is omitting names for their privacy and protection. The video the homeowner sent to VT is a little over a minute long and due to the language only screenshots will be used.
The woman was home alone while her husband was at work in Tifton.
“My job requires me to go to work for 24 hours and it hurts to know my wife is home and feels insecure,” her husband said. “I put this system in a couple of years ago to be more secure but now it’s doing the opposite.”
He also explained that the only way that siren could come on is if someone was on their Ring app and activated it physically themselves.
Waking up to the sound of the siren she walked outside and suddenly got the scare of her life when the other Ring cameras on their back porch started talking to her.
At first she thought it must be her husband kidding around with her. But the language was coarse and prolonged, threatening to kill her, her dog.
“Hey come back here right now b*****,” the voice says. After a pause it continues with, “Hey b****, come back now…”
You can hear her on the phone and the voice is seeming to respond to what she’s saying as she walks around the back porch.
The young male voice can be heard snickering.
“…the camera out here is talking to me,” she says on the phone.
“Shut the f*** up,” it says in response “I’m gonna kill your f****** dog…”
“It’s you...” she says anxiously, hoping it is her husband. “It said get back inside now…no I didn’t. The motion light thing started going off…I don’t know what to do…”
“Shut the f*** up…” the voice repeats.
She continues to speak on the phone nervously, confused.
“Come the fuck back here now before I f****** kill you…,” the voice says gruffly, then switches his tone and says sweetly, and mockingly, “I’m just playing sweetheart, I love you….Quit playing with my emotions, you’re hurting me.”
After her husband assured her it wasn’t him playing a joke on her she called the Berrien County Sheriff’s Office and a friend.
“We called the sheriff’s office and they wrote a report but there wasn’t anything else they could do since they don’t have the resources to investigate it,” her husband said Friday.
Several of these hacks on Ring have occurred in the last week and seems to be egging on the hacking bandits.
When the homeowners called Ring they told her it wasn’t their fault and the only solutions they could offer was to change their password and use two-step authentication.
“We’ve changed the Ring passwords and wifi passwords,” he said. “But my original ones were something that meant something to me that no one else would know using capital and special characters.”
Ring customer service before now has always been great to the homeowners, he said, but when he called about this incident the person I talked to was only slightly apologetic and offered no real solutions other than changing passwords.
Unlike some security systems, there isn’t an automatic link to alert law enforcement. “When I bought the system they gave me the option of purchasing a third-party service separately but I didn’t get that,” he said.
Fortunately, the homeowners do not have Ring cameras inside their home.
“I’ve always had a concern that someone could hack the cloud and get our videos, but I never expected this,” he said. “But when you think about how it could be used, like to watch your house and get your schedule, it’s very frightening.”
Ring sent Valdosta Today a statement for a previous post this week which read:
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
Statement from RING
Security on any tech device is vulnerable. Even the most dedicated users are at risk of being hacked by a stealthy, clever individual with the desire to do it.
