It spreads: Hacking baby monitors creepy new trend

Heather and Adam Schreck were asleep in their Cincinnati-area home at about midnight when they heard the voice of a man coming from the room of their 10-month-old daughter, Emma.

The shocked father didn't find the man in the room, but the man's voice could be heard through the family's Internet baby monitor, which has a speaker and a camera that can be controlled online.

Adam Schreck recalled his moment of horror in an ABC News "Good Morning, America" report.

"The voice was screaming, 'Wake up, baby; wake up, baby.'"

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Then, in a scene reminiscent of the macabre TV classic "The Twilight Zone," the man who had obviously hacked into the Schreck's system began moving the camera.

"The camera then turned and looked at me and it started screaming some obscenities at me," Adam Schreck said.

Heather Schreck told "Fox and Friends" Tuesday morning the whole experience "was terrifying."

She said her husband then unplugged the camera.

"And then we just had to console Emma, who was terrified," she said.

The Schrecks' experience is not unique.

Among the many reports over the past several years, a man hacked into a Houston family's Web-connected baby monitor last August to call a 2-year-old a “little slut.”

When Marc Gilbert and his wife Lauren entered the room, the voice cursed them as well, reported ABC News.

The couple said the creepy voice had a British or European accent.

As he and his wife got closer to the room, they heard the voice calling his daughter an "effing moron" and telling her, "Wake up you little slut."

Hackable camera

The Gilberts and the Schrecks were using a camera made by China-based Foscam. The Gilberts discovered the hacker was able to add his own user name and password to the device so he could log in at will. However, any information that would trace him was wiped out when Gilbert disconnected the camera.

Two separate groups of researchers had demonstrated that Internet-connected cameras have security flaws that make them easily hackable, Forbes reported last August.

Foscam had released a firmware update to fix the problem, but Gilbert was unaware of it.

Wired columnist Mat Honan wrote in October that he had been warning parents for years not to buy a dedicated Internet-connected baby monitor.

Along with the security risks, the $200 cameras are a waste of money, he said, because the same thing can be accomplished with an IP camera and smartphone apps for $75 or less.

He said camera hacking is a growing problem, and any parent who does decide to buy a dedicated camera should take some important steps to increase security.

One is to register the product to be sure not to miss any firmware updates. Another is to have a good firewall around the home network to provide a basic first line of defense from attackers. A third step is to limit the remote IP addresses that can connect to the router and throttle the connection rate to protect against brute force attacks.

Honan said it's also important to change the default admin login on the router and on the camera’s software tools, a simple security measure that the Schrecks didn't take until after their horrifying incident.

None of the steps will make the camera totally secure from hacking, Honan explained, but it will make it harder to access remotely.

Neighborhood broadcast

Similar problems were reported with the older baby video monitors, which used broadcast frequencies that could be received by neighbors or someone simply driving around the neighborhood with a baby monitor.

An Illinois man filed a lawsuit in 2009 alleging the “Summer Day and Night Video Monitor” he and his wife purchased had broadcast capabilities he and his wife were not aware of. He discovered that his neighbors, who also had a baby monitor, were receiving his signal and could see into his home.

In 2010, the "Today" show featured a report by WNBC-TV in New York City in which a reporter drove around a Long Island neighborhood with a baby monitor attached to the dash to illustrate how easy it was to tap into the video transmissions of baby monitors in homes.

"We were able to peek into crib after crib after crib," said WNBC's Tom Llamas.

WPBF-TV in West Palm Beach, Florida, did a similar story, advising that an encrypted, password-protected home wireless network would provide better security.