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.
The hacker hurled obscenities at them, including the N-word, Sud said. "It was terrifying," his wife Jessica Sud told WBBM-TV.
Arjun Sud also noticed the Nest thermostat they have upstairs had been raised to 90 degrees. He suspected the hacker was behind that too.
"And then they messed with our thermostat?" Jessica Sud asked. "Who does that?"
The Suds disconnected the cameras they have inside their house and called Nest and the police. Arjun Sud said the company urged him to use two-factor authentication, an online security procedure where customers take an additional step, like entering a temporary code, in addition to passwords when logging into the system.
The Suds' experience comes after another harrowing incident involving a hacked Nest camera. A California family was alarmed when someone used their camera's speaker to warn of an impending missile strike from North Korea and to take cover, CBS News correspondent Anna Werner reported.
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."
Earlier this month, a website that tracks compromised login information said it found more than 790 million exposed email addresses and passwords. Google has said it had recently reset all Nest accounts "where customers reused passwords that were previously exposed" and was "actively introducing features that will reject compromised passwords, allow customers to monitor access to their accounts and track external entities that abuse" login information.
First published on January 31, 2019
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