Hacker Spoke To Baby and Hurled Obscenities At Couple Using Nest Camera, Dad Says (cbsnews.com)

pgmrdlm shares a report from CBS News: An Illinois couple said a hacker spoke to their baby through one of their Nest security cameras and then later hurled obscenities at them, CBS station WBBM-TV reports. Arjun Sud told the station he was outside his 7-month-old son's room Sunday outside Chicago and he heard someone talking. "I was shocked to hear a deep, manly voice talking," Sud said. "My blood ran cold." Sud told WBBM-TV he thought the voice was coming over the baby monitor by accident. But it returned when he and his wife were downstairs. The voice was coming from another of the many Nest cameras throughout the couple's Lake Barrington house. "Asking me, you know, why I'm looking at him -- because he saw obviously that I was looking back -- and continuing to taunt me," Sud said. Later that night, Arjun Sud noticed the Nest thermostat they have upstairs had been raised to 90 degrees. He suspected the hacker was behind that too. Nest's parent company, Google, said in a statement that Nest's system was not breached. Google said the recent incidents stem from customers "using compromised passwords exposed through breaches on other websites."

Comments

Re:I may be a luddite

[Askmum]

If you reuse passwords - and even if you don't - https://haveibeenpwned.com/ can be pretty useful.

It's only marginaly usefull. Yes, I have been pwned, my email address is listed in the "Anti Public Combo List".
So? With what password? I have to use my email address at many sites to log on and of course I do not reuse my passwords, so one of them is compromised. It doesn't tell me which. So I don't know which password to change.

Cloud services

[Bert64]

Devices like this should be standalone, not tied into an external cloud service...
You the owner of the device should decide exactly who has access, and be ultimately responsible if you choose weak passwords or fail to further protect the system with an additional layer such as a VPN.

I have CCTV at home, it requires that i first connect to a VPN in order to access it from outside. The cameras themselves are probably horrendously insecure, but they don't connect directly to the internet and are only accessed through a VPN which is actively maintained and gives me a reasonable level of confidence that noone other than myself has access.