Amazon Ring hacker caught taunting Florida man, police officer
The Ring hacker can be heard saying: 'You're getting hacked by a 5-year-old, dude'
A Florida man's Ring security system was hacked by someone who taunted him and a police officer who arrived at the home, going as far as to say he had witnessed homeowners performing sexual acts, video footage shows.
"You're getting hacked by a 5-year-old, dude," the person can be heard at one point telling the homeowner, identified by the Daily Mail as Joshua Koop.
"So, do you hack into the cameras that are inside the house too?" Koop asks the hacker at the beginning of the video, prompting the young-sounding voice to respond: "All the time."
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Koop is seen standing in the driveway of what appears to be his home as he continues his conversation with the person, even discussing the type of car he owns and asking the stranger more questions.
"So do you see, like, any naked people? Probably all the time, right?" he is heard asking.
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The person responds, "Oh yeah."
"I see those, too," he says, before referencing a sexual act he claims to have witnessed during a breach. "I did, I really did."
(AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
The hacker proceeds to brag about getting the cops called to a home that had a Ring system he had broken into because they had a gun out.
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Koop, who mentions in the footage that the stranger had told him he was 16 years old, is seen looking up at the camera, standing barefoot in the driveway, as a police car pulls up. As the nearly three-minute clip continues, the hacker begins commenting on the female police officer's appearance as she approaches the home.
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"Cops aren't no scared of me. I've seen them billions of times," the voice says. "I'll stick around, I don't care. They're probably going to take the camera for evidence like they did last time."
Ring systems have reportedly been hacked in at least four states across the nation, including in Florida, Georgia and Connecticut, The New York Times reported.
The hacker also talks about a friend who was on the news for "telling little kids he was Santa Claus," likely referring to how a hacker accessed a Mississippi family's Ring system in early December and started talking to an 8-year-old girl.
The girl's mother, Ashley LeMay, recently told FOX Business the camera – which allows someone on one end of the camera to speak to the other end – had been set up only four days before her daughter heard music playing in the bedroom on Dec. 4. WMC Action News 5 first reported the breach. The hacker could be heard telling the girl: "I'm your best friend. I'm Santa Claus." The FBI has since been in contact with the LeMay family.
VICE's Motherboard recently reported hackers are accessing the Ring camera feeds and then livestreaming themselves as they interact with the people on the other side of the camera. The live feed is aired through "NulledCast," a podcast that runs on Gamer and streamer channel Discord.
The outlet shared a screengrab of a message posted to the NulledCast podcast's Discord server, which stated, in part:
"Hey NulledCast fans, we need to calm down on the ring trolling, we have 3 investigations and two of us are already probably f-----. Drop suggestions on what else we should do. It will still happen just on a much smaller scale."
A spokesperson for Ring said in a statement to FOX Business the company encourages users to enable two-factor authentication.
"Our security team has investigated this incident, and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network. Recently, we were made aware of an incident where malicious actors obtained some Ring users’ account credentials (e.g., username and password) from a separate, external, non-Ring service and reused them to log in to some Ring accounts," the spokesperson said. "Unfortunately, when the same username and password is reused on multiple services, it’s possible for bad actors to gain access to many accounts. Upon learning of the incident, we took appropriate actions to promptly block bad actors from known affected Ring accounts and affected users have been contacted."
But not all encounters caught on video are negative. A delivery truck Amazon driver was spotted on tape performing a happy dance after learning that a family in Tennessee had left out snacks and drinks.
This story was updated to include a statement provided by a Ring spokesperson.
