The personal data for thousands of owners of the Ring camera was reportedly compromised this week, exposing information such as login names and passwords.
According to Buzzfeed News, the data leak also exposed the names of cameras such as “bedroom” or “front door.”
Screenshots of an email from Ring to customers posted by Buzzfeed encourage enabling two-factor authentication on accounts and resetting passwords.
In a statement obtained by USA TODAY, Ring said they have notified customers whose accounts have been identified as exposed and reset passwords, but insists the company did not have a data breach.
“Our security team has investigated these incidents, and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network,” Ring said in a statement.
Several families who own Ring cameras have shared scary encounters involving hackers gaining access to the devices. Recently, a family in Mississippi said a hacker gained access to a camera in their daughters’ bedroom.
During one clip taken from the Ring camera, a voice is heard saying, “I’m your best friend. I’m Santa Claus.”
In a blog post published last week, Ring said the reports of hacks are not a result of their system being breached.
“Recently, we were made aware of an incident where malicious actors obtained some Ring users’ account credentials (e.g., username and password) from a separate, external, non-Ring service and reused them to log into some Ring accounts,” reads an excerpt from the post. “Unfortunately, when people reuse the same username and password on multiple services, it’s possible for bad actors to gain access to many accounts.”
This is not the first time Ring has been criticized over privacy. Last month, the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox browser, said Ring was among its worst privacy offenders, claiming the doorbells have “vulnerabilities that could let someone go Big Brother on you in your own home.”
Critics have also questioned partnerships with law enforcement and Amazon, the owners of Ring, potentially creating areas under constant surveillance.
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