Baby monitors are a staple of any new parent’s toolkit, designed to put mums and dads’ minds at ease.
And yet, one mother found her monitor the opposite of reassuring after a hacker managed to hack the device and use it to speak to her young son.
Influencer Kurin Adele made the frightening claim in a TikTok posted on Saturday.
In the clip, which racked up 6.1 million views in three days, Adele told viewers that she’d noticed over “the past couple of weeks to a couple of months” that her son had been unplugging his bedroom camera.
On Friday night, she asked her husband to plug the device back in which, to her surprise, made her little boy very upset.
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“My son starts crying and he's like, ‘I don't want my camera plugged in, I don't want my camera plugged in,’” she recounted.
“‘Someone talks to me at night and it scares me, someone wakes me up and talks to me and I'm scared.’”
The content creator said she and her husband “looked at each other completely terrified” before reassuring their child that he was safe and they wouldn’t be plugging the camera back in.
She then explained that they immediately went to change the password to the app for the device, at which point they received a message from its manufacturer, Owlet.
The pop-up read: “This password has appeared in a data leak, which puts this account at high risk for compromise. You should change your password immediately.”
Furious, Adele continued: “Who the heck knows how long someone has had our password and has been messing with my son? Owlet never notified us.
“The only reason we didn't know about this sooner is because our son thought it was us talking to him, so whoever was talking to him was telling him that it was his mum and dad.”
She ended the clip by urging fellow parents to ditch their wifi cameras, claiming that “people are hacking into baby monitors left and right just to mess with people”.
@kurinadeleGet rid of your wifi cameras!!!!! #owletcamera #babymonitorhack
Her video racked up more than 850,000 likes and 6,400 comments as fellow TikTokers rushed to share their horror at Adele’s discovery.
“10th video I have seen of a baby monitor getting hacked,” one wrote.
“As someone who designed networks for a living, I would NEVER recommend a wifi enabled camera. They're so easy to hack,” said another.
“I’m a law student and we did a trip to the cyber police department and the guy also said to never get ‘smart’ baby monitors,” added a third.
On Monday, Adele shared an update, saying Owlet had replied to her complaint about the whole affair after she sent them a “hate email”.
“They responded with a very dismissive email, basically telling me that their data is super encrypted and there's no way that someone could hack in, but they'd like to look into it further,” she said.
However, she went on: “About 20 minutes ago, I got an email directly from Owlet, It looks like they saw my video.”
She went on to say that she felt “a little bit bummed” that the “only reason they're reaching out to me is because I have a platform and my video went viral,” before admitting that she was still “excited to see how they rectify the situation”.
The mother-of-two, who’s expecting her third child, said she was keen to know whether they’d be able to find out who logged into their account, adding that she’d keep her followers posted on any updates.
@kurinadeleOwlet update!! #babymonitor #babymonitorhack #owlet #owletcamera
At the time of writing, the mystery of the hacker had yet to be solved, and Adele’s most recent video was about a trip to Taco Bell.
Indy100 has contacted Owlet for comment.
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