The one-way walkie-talkie baby monitors that parents once used to listen in on their sleeping babies are a thing of the past. Today’s moms and dads are spying on their children with wireless IP cameras that you set up in your nursery and access through your mobile phone. The web-connected systems are popular because you can tune into your dozing (or screaming) child from anywhere you can get cell reception or wi-fi. It’s not uncommon for parents out on a date to call up the camera to make sure the sitter put their precious cargo to bed on time.

Handy? Yes, but a couple in Ohio recently learned that there’s one big drawback to this new technology: Creepy strangers can hack into your camera.

Heather Schreck was asleep when she was woken in the middle of the night by a man’s voice coming from her baby’s room in her Cincinnati home.

Heather picked up her mobile phone and accessed the camera to check on her 10-month-old daughter Emma’s room.

The camera was moving, but Heather wasn’t moving it, and then she heard the man’s voice again and he was screaming, “Wake up baby, wake up baby!”

Heather sent her husband, Adam Schreck, into Emma’s room, and Fox 19-TV reported that the camera turned to point directly at him and the man started yelling obscenities. Adam unplugged the camera, not realizing that turning it off erased its log of IP addresses and any trace of the hacker.

The Schreck family was using the latest IP camera from China-based Foscam. Last August, a similar incident occurred with a Foscam camera when a hacker accessed a Houston couple’s device and called their 2-year-old a slut.

To Sergey Shekyan, who works at Shape Security by day and researches IP cameras by night, these incidents aren’t surprising. In the spring of 2013, he and his colleague Artem Harutyunyan from Qualys released research revealing that these Internet-connected cameras are ridden with security flaws and easily hijacked by hackers. Foscam introduced an emergency software patch in July of 2013 but after doing a scan of Internet-connected Foscam cameras, Shekyan and Harutyunyan found people weren’t installing the patch. “Of the nearly 46,000 Foscams that came up in the scan, over 40,000 have not updated their systems to fix the vulnerability” Forbes.com reported.

Foscam has since sent out additional security patches by emailing people who registered cameras with their site, but most consumers fail to register their items and the few who do never open the email updates.

“Nobody takes the time to register,” Shekyan says. “Nobody cares to manually apply the patch. Foscam needs to come up with a better system for pushing security updates.”

The latest Foscam updates include account lockout after several failed login attempts and a beefed up authentication mechanism but Shekyan says the the company is still working on fixing other major issues.

While Foscam is the best known wireless camera company with security vulnerabilities, it isn’t the only one with problems. Shekyan says competing brands — such as Wansview, Tenvis, EasyN and Insteon — are using cloned software and have the same issues.

Shekyan first became interested in IP cameras after he and his wife welcomed their first baby and he purchased a camera on Amazon. “When I read that you could access your camera outside your home — that caught my attention,” he said. I knew there was probably a vulnerability.”

While hackers can view your baby through your camera, they can also steal your email and Wi-Fi credentials, run malicious software to attack other devices on your home network or just use the camera as a malware distribution device, Sheykan warns. And they can do this all without you knowing. “If you aren’t aware of the threat, you wouldn’t find any traces,” Sheykan says.

How can consumers protect themselves? Your best option is to not hook your camera up to the Internet, but if you must be sure to register the device and keep up with security updates. Also, update your Wi-Fi password and the camera password.

How can consumers protect themselves? Your best option is to not hook your camera up to the Internet, but if you must, here a few things you can do to increase security:

Register your device and keep up with security updates.

Change the camera’s default username and password.

Do not share the same password across devices and services.

Do not use the dynamic DNS service provided by camera vendors.

Do you use an wireless camera as a baby monitor? Are you aware of the security issues?