Amazon Ring hackers livestreamed themselves terrorizing residents
A hacker accessed the Ring camera installed in a Mississippi girl's bedroom and began talking to her
Hackers are tapping into Amazon Ring camera security systems and terrorizing residents all while livestreaming their virtual break-ins through a podcast forum, VICE’s Motherboard reported.
Stocks In This Article:
These 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.
"Sit back and relax to over 45 minutes of entertainment," stated an ad for the podcast, according to the report. "Join us as we go on completely random tangents such as; Ring & Nest Trolling, telling shelter owners we killed a kitten, Nulled drama, and more ridiculous topics."
The Discord website appeared to be down on Friday morning. Motherboard 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.”
Earlier this week, news broke of a Mississippi couple whose family was terrorized by a Ring hacker who accessed the camera installed in their young daughter's bedroom and began speaking to their 8-year-old.
The children’s mother, Ashley LeMay, 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.
AMAZON RING HACKER ACCESSED CAMERA IN CHILD'S ROOM, TOLD GIRL HE WAS SANTA CLAUS
“I was in the hallway, I thought it was my sister because I was hearing some music,” the child told the outlet. "So I come upstairs and I hear some banging noise and I was like ‘who is that?’”
GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
After asking the question, the hacker responded: “I’m your best friend. I’m Santa Claus,” according to a video posted by the news station.
LeMay said she has since been contacted by the FBI. She had heard of Discord before, but never "NulledCast," she said.
Though she has been unable to confirm so far that the hacked footage from her device had been streamed through the Discord server, she and even her daughter recognized the voice as being one that they had heard in videos of previous Ring breaches, LeMay said.
AMAZON’S RING HOME SECURITY AIMS FOR SAFETY, BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR PRIVACY?
A cached page from the website shows Discord operates, at least in part, through subscription services.
"There's people that are paying for this," she said. "They're paying to watch my daughter being terrorized and they're waiting to see what her response is."
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."
This story was updated to include a statement from a Ring spokesperson.
