Family says Ring camera in 8-year-old daughter's room accessed by hacker

Brett Molina and Jane Mo | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Hacker gained access to Ring camera in 8-year-old's room A family in Mississippi says a hacker gained access to a Ring camera placed in their 8-year-old daughter's room and started talking to her.

A family in Mississippi claims a hacker gained access to a Ring camera placed in their 8-year-old daughter's room and started talking to her, say local reports.

A video obtained by USA TODAY shows a view of the child's room while mysterious music starts playing from the Ring. A voice can also be heard saying "Hello there."

During one clip, the voice is heard saying, "I'm your best friend. I'm Santa Claus."

Another clip shows the voice encouraging the child to destroy her room. "You can do whatever you want right now," said the voice. "You can mess up your room. You can break your TV."

Ashley LeMay and her husband then decided to disable the Ring camera.

"As soon as I got to the point where I heard like this person's voice, I knew something was terribly wrong," said LeMay during an interview with USA TODAY.

Each time I've watched this video it's given me chills.



A Desoto County mother shared this Ring video with me. Four days after the camera was installed in her daughters' room she says someone hacked the camera & began talking to her 8-year-old daughter.



More at 6 on #WMC5 pic.twitter.com/77xCekCnB0 — Jessica Holley (@Jessica_Holley) December 10, 2019

LeMay said she bought the Ring camera during Black Friday at the advice of another mother. Four days after installing it, her daughter was confronted by the mysterious voice.

"My main thing was not knowing who it was, them having my home address and then them trying to gain my daughter's trust," said LeMay. "It almost made me feel like – and maybe I'm exaggerating – but it also made me worried that she could be kidnapped or anything like that."

In a statement obtained by USA TODAY, Ring said the incident was not related to a breach or compromise of its security.

"Due to the fact that customers often use the same username and password for their various accounts and subscriptions, bad actors often re-use credentials stolen or leaked from one service on other services," said Ring's statement. "As a precaution, we highly and openly encourage all Ring users to enable two-factor authentication on their Ring account, add Shared Users (instead of sharing login credentials), use strong passwords and regularly change their passwords."

LeMay said the family's Wi-Fi password is different from any other device she uses, and that they use a secure network.

"It's not to defend myself but just an effort to say that even if you have all those things, you are not 100% safe," said LeMay.

This is not the first incident in which users of security cameras like Ring or Nest have experienced mysterious voices or sounds. Earlier this year, a California family said they heard an emergency warning from their Nest camera about three missiles from North Korea preparing to strike the U.S.

Google, the parent company of Nest, said the incident happened because of a compromised password, not a direct hack of their system. Like Ring, Nest advises users to use strong passwords and enable two-factor authentication.

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.