490
Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
490 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
2122 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
At this point I really don't understand why anyone would put a camera in their home that's connected to a server they don't control.
Laziness. Most people don't want to research everything needed to set up a self hosted camera system. Much easier to pop into Best Buy and grab a Wyze camera that works out of the box.
I wouldn't call it lazy necessarily, everyone just has limited time and energy to invest in stuff and probably had no idea of the risks.
More likely people lack the time.
Besides, expecting a security camera company to provide a decent quality product that doesn't suffer egregiously serious breaches like Wyze has is not unreasonable. Idealistic, maybe; lacking an appropriately enormous degree of cynicism.
Quite an unhealthy lifestyle.
How do these people not realize that these cameras let other people to see into their homes?
This has happened SO. Many. Times.
I really wonder how much everyday people care. Years back, people would give out their passwords for chocolate. Most people at this point have had their SSN’s leaked multiple times, all their PII is generally available somewhere, they use unencrypted SMS and email for financial transactions, etc… convenience is worth way more to the average person than having a few pictures of their house leaked. Even if they’re in it. It just doesn’t enter their mind as a problem. Last few people I brought it up to about their wyze or blink cameras just shrugged off the privacy stuff. (Though none of them had them in their homes, just external doorbell/driveway kinda cameras)
So many cameras are left on the default password. On the insecam site they keep a list of cams where you can just look into people's home, all hacked by using the default password. And it keeps happening.
I agree. It just doesn't occur to most people. It takes a certain mindset to think about the worst things that could happen. Not everyone can think like a bad guy.
Wrong, everyone can.
In the spirit of the separation of people into those who backup their data and who don't do that yet.
Don't forget cost, I'm working on replacing mine, but a 30 dollar camera now being replaced by ones that cost around 100 each is just taking time. The ones I have outdoors I don't really care about, but I'm working hard to replace all the indoor ones. For now all my indoor wyze cameras are on zigbee plugs that cut power when we're home.
For me it's one less camera I have to run on my server that is already overwhelmed with the 12 other cameras that watch the outside. I have my wyze cams on sonoff minis that kill power to them unless I have my house set as away. I don't need 247 recording of the inside just give me the option to peek in while away to see if anything is alarming.
I'm sure I'm going to get some shit for this, but here we go! I own a wyzecam that I keep in (but due to lack of necessity will soon be removing from) my daughter's room. We had it there just to check and see if she was asleep in her crib still without walking up the very creaky stairs/hall to her room.
It has pretty garbage resolution, has no sensitive information in frame, is not in a part of the house that anything can be overheard, and literally just shows a blurry image of our daughter's bed.
I guess someone could theoretically sign in and...watch a 3 year old sleep? The worst case scenario I can imagine is someone using the speaker function to scare my kid, which would suck, but I think I can risk it.
I have one to watch my dogs when I am away. It was cheap and I only plug it in occasionally when I am gone for a while. Probably about 3 hours a week. I figure if it is mostly off it will be hard to be exposed, and even if so, all you will see are my dogs in their crates.
And that you're not home.
How many people you think live near me, are able to hack my Wyze cam, are into breaking and entry, and read this post so they know that when the camera is on I am probably not home?
It would be a hell of a lot easier to just wait until you don’t see cars in my driveway, or watch my house until you see me leave.
I'm not a criminal, but if I was, I'd get a group together and monitor all the feeds for when I see people go on vacation, then break in. And if they are stupid enough to have sex in front of a security camera in their bedroom or other rooms in their house, it would make excellent blackmail material for different types of extortion if you didn't want to risk the police coming. Those can be more lucrative anyways.
You starting this by staying “I am not a criminal” proved my point.
A Wyze security failure is not putting my at risk of being robbed. There are easier ways to tell when people go on vacation. Your plan is to get illicit access to someone’s camera, hope they live near by, check up on them daily, wait for them to be gone for a couple days, assume that means they will be gone for a while longer, then rob them?
Most people post vacations on social media, why bother hacking and stalking them. Just find people who post about their international vacations on FB. Easier to do and you get much better information about how long they will be gone.
Without an address
Because zoneminder sucks and the other ones are kind of corporate and crappy?
Zoneminder is damn good for the price. Mine has never had a data breach either. So there's your downvote.
When it fucks up, good luck fixing it without an os reinstall. That's the price. If it was easier/possible to restore to a fully working state after it gets borked, it would be really good.
It's really easy for me to fix it if it breaks, since I have full disk images of the microSD card it runs on in my RPi 4. You could do the same with any linux system for most types of disks with cloning tools.