Photo Courtesy of Ring
By Michael V. Cusenza
If you’ve seen the video, goose bumps likely still plague your skin.
Earlier this month, Alyssa LeMay, 8, heard sounds emanating from the bedroom she shares with her two sisters inside their family’s Mississippi home. So she walked into the bedroom to investigate.
The unnerving events that followed were captured on the Ring camera that Alyssa’s parents installed in the room as an extra security measure.
“Hello,” a man’s disembodied voice cheerfully exclaimed.
Alyssa was stumped. Who was this person? Where were they?
“I’m your best friend,” the voice later declared. “You can do whatever you want right now. You could mess up your room, you could break your TV—you can do whatever you want.”
“Who is that?!?” a visibly upset Alyssa exclaimed.
“I’m your best friend,” was the creepy reply. “I’m Santa Claus.”
According to The Washington Post, the LeMays said “the man was able to interact with their daughter after hacking” the Ring camera.
“Over the course of several minutes, the man repeatedly directed a racial slur at Alyssa and tried to persuade her to misbehave,” the Post wrote.
According to Vice News, the LeMays’ dilemma wasn’t the only instance of a compromised Ring product this month.
“Last week a wave of local media reports found hackers harassed people through Ring devices,” according to a Dec. 17 story on Vice’s tech site Motherboard.
Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in February 2018 for $1 billion, insisted that its services have not been jeopardized.
“You may have recently seen reports that Ring services have been compromised, and we want to inform you that we have investigated this incident and have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network,” the company posted to its blog.
Later in the post, Ring also provided security best practices to ensure your Ring account stays secure:
Enable Two-Factor Authentication: This creates an extra layer of security. You’ll receive a unique code via text message to your phone whenever you or someone else attempts to log into your Ring account and is asked for your Ring password.
Add Shared Users: Don’t provide your login information to others. If you want to share access to your Ring devices with other people, simply add them as a shared user.
Use Different Passwords for Each Account: By using different usernames and passwords on your various accounts, you reduce the risk that a malicious actor could reuse credentials compromised from another account to access your Ring account. A password manager allows you to conveniently store all of your passwords in a centralized vault on your computer and, if you wish, in the cloud. This means you only need to remember one password to unlock all of your passwords. All major browsers have built-in password managers, and there are also a variety of commercial providers that will permit you to synchronize your vaults between devices.
Create Strong Passwords: Create strong passwords with a mix of numbers, letters (both uppercase and lowercase), and symbols, and embrace long, non-dictionary based words or phrases.
