HACKER WAS WAITING AT MY VACATION HOME

I was excited to take my niece on her first trip away from her mom, dad, and little sister. She is 13 and we love spending time together so this was going to be a fun and relaxing trip. We were heading to our vacation home by the beach, a gate guarded community with little to no crime, in a picturesque town where we have spent our free time for the past ten years. We flew out early and arrived at our home around 10 am. We had a lot of things planned like biking, golfing, pools, and the beach.

We started our day at the seaside pool lounging on chairs that are placed in the pool for cooling down on a hot day. After a long day, we decided to grab some Southern fried chicken and mash potatoes to eat at home while we watched a scary movie upstairs.

We decided on a classic scary movie, “Sixth Sense” with Bruce Willis. Very scary. As the movie ended and the house was silent, my phone rang it was my son calling to ask a question about flights, he was planning on joining us in a few days. Suddenly we heard a scream from one of the bedrooms. I looked at Mia with concern and said, “Did you hear that?” Her eyes were as wide open as they could be and this answered my question. I said to my son we just heard something in one of the rooms and I am going to check it out. I asked him to stay on the phone with me. I walked into the room and checked under the bed and in the closet, nothing. “That’s weird,” I said to Mia. Then we heard it again coming from a different room. I ran in the other room and did the same check under the bed and closets, there was nothing in the room. We have a security camera system, I looked at the camera, and thought maybe it is inadvertently picking up sounds like a baby monitor? We walked out of the room and then we heard a weird laugh. I said, “There has to be some other device.” Maybe one of the kids left something in the bed, the last time we were here. I started to check the bedsheets. Nope, nothing. Maybe someone is in the attic? Then we heard a scream downstairs.
At this point, my son said, “Let me get dad on the phone.” We were so scared we ran downstairs, only to hear a laugh upstairs. We opened the front door and stepped outside. I told my husband I was going to call the security guards to come over and check the house, but he said to call John to come over to check it out. He logged on to the cameras to monitor the situation. John is one of our friends that lives up the street. I hung up and called John. While Mia and I waited on the front lawn I heard music playing upstairs. I said to Mia, “I am going up”. As I crept up each stair, slowly like a stupid horror movie where the girl goes into the haunted house and you know she is going to be killed and everyone is yelling don’t go in there is a serial killer up there! Mia yells “Don’t go Auntie, please don’t go.” I stopped where I was and came down. “Your right Mia, I’ll wait,” I said. John pulled into the driveway and we gave him the scoop on what was happening and we all walk in the house. Nothing but silence. I was thinking oh no if the noise doesn’t happen again when he is here and we don’t figure this out we will have to sleep somewhere else. There is no way Mia and I would be able to sleep in the house with screams coming from different rooms. Finally, we heard someone scream upstairs. John thought it was from outside and walked outside and said, “yes, see the man walking the dog? It must have been him making the noise.” Suddenly the creepy music is coming from upstairs. We head up. Nope. Just silence. John looked at the camera, looked in all the closets and then we hear a man’s scream downstairs. We head back down. John walks over to the camera and looks at it and said “Hello?” A voice says hello back. John begins a conversation with the man. He said he was a security camera specialist and he wanted us to know that there was no password on our camera. He knew how many cameras we had in the house and said our Foscam needed to have a password. We were hacked! You can listen to the conversation with the Hacker Here. He ended the conversation by blasting the theme song “Space Jams. John unplugged our camera. Then we heard Space Jams blasting from upstairs. We ran upstairs and unplugged that camera as well, then went to unplug the last camera in the garage.
We loved having our cameras available to check on the house when we needed like after any weather-related events in the area. But after this learning experience, I can only wonder how long he or others have been watching us? Since we aren’t at the house often, he most likely had the cameras set for movement notification, so when someone walked by, he was notified and then he laid in wait to scare the bejibies out of us. He must have had such a great time watching and listening to us panic. He played the haunted house card perfectly. The screams, the creepy laughs, the music, and the silence. Maybe he was a good-hearted hacker just out to let people know they need a password. Can there be such a thing as a good-hearted hacker? I would have to say yes. He brought to light an important privacy issue, if you have cameras or monitoring devices in your home, your movements and private conversations may not be so private. I immediately started researching more on Foscam hacking. I have studied cybersecurity and understand the vulnerabilities especially as it pertains to international travel, here is my blog about safety and security gaps when traveling. One thing I have learned is there is so much more to discover when it comes to cybersecurity and privacy. My research led me to uncover additional vulnerabilities and I realize the hacker really did us a favor. If he was malicious he would have never engaged in a conversation with us about the unsecured devices in our home. He would have just watched. Maybe he would have streamed us live on the dark web or other places, as was the case of a mother who found a picture of her daughters’ room on a Facebook page with hundreds of likes.
On Wednesday, June 07, 2017 Swati Khandelwal published a great article, Hard-coded Passwords Make Hacking Foscam ‘IP Cameras’ Much Easier. I wish I read this last week! Very interesting and helpful information. If you, your family or friends have any type of camera monitoring device in your home you should read this fascinating article on hacking.

I think the big question is, do you leave the door to your home open so anyone can come in whenever they want? If the answer is no, then you obviously take time to lock your doors. This is what you will want to do to hackers as well, lock them out. Here are some ideas to help in this invisible world of hacking. After this experience, I know there are a lot of people that are being hacked and have no idea. Not long ago I was one of them.
Tips to protect your family and privacy:
· Change your default passwords!
· Find out if your camera has a factory hard-coded credential that cannot be changed by the user.
· Use a firewall with your internet and a smart security router like F-Secure SENSE which can detect if your cameras or baby monitors are being misused.
I told my niece the moral of the story is never do or say anything you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see or hear. Cameras are everywhere you may as well realize one day you may end up on the internet one way or another.
