Baby monitors are ubequitous in homes around the world because they provide a way for parents to check on their child and because they are also a source of security.
Increasingly, however, hackers are finding ways to pirate private video streams that are captured by baby monitors. While cases have been reported in the past, it's never been clear just what the hackers have been doing with the private images they've captured. Now, it appears that some hackers are collecting the photos for general broadcast.
One family from Rochester, Minnesota discovered that hackers had figured out how to spy on their kids via their video-based baby monitors. The process all started when strange sounds started coming out of the machine. "We were sleeping in bed, and basically heard some music coming from the nursery, but then when we went into the room the music turned off," the family (who wished to stay anonymous) told KTTC. "Where were these tunes coming from? Would you have guessed another country?"
The family tracked the IP that had accessed the monitor, and – to their horror – discovered it was connected to a website from Amsterdam. That site hosted thousands of photos of unsuspecting families captured by monitors all over the world. They were able to look at photos across the world, and eventually found their own.
Upon this discovery, the family disabled all of their monitoring equipment and disconnected the devices. In order to test the story, KTTC had the family reactivate the device to retrace the connection between the monitors and the site. Within a few hours of the monitor's reactivation, photos from the monitor reappeared on the public site.
At present it's unclear what the purpose of this site was, or who is controlling it but it authorities are just beginning to theorize that such sites are being frequented by pedophiles.
