If you own a Ring camera and you’ve seen headlines like Vice’s “How Hackers Are Breaking Into Ring Cameras,” you’re undoubtedly a bit nervous. Has someone broken into your own home setup? Are they watching you? Your pets? Your kids?
Maybe—but there’s something easy you can do to stop it. As it turns out, the responsibility for securing your Ring account rests directly on your shoulders. There isn’t some crazy backdoor method or big vulnerability hackers are exploiting to break into Ring accounts and view (or mess with) peoples’ cameras. They’re taking advantage of users’ lax security practices to brute-force their way into these accounts.
The attacks—as reported by Vice—use tools that blast Ring with potential account logins, likely stolen from other breaches. It shouldn’t take an attacker’s utility that long to find a working login, given that most people are lazy and reuse their user names and passwords across multiple sites.
So, Ring owner: take these steps right now to lock down your account from these kinds of “hacking” attempts:
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Stop reusing the same password across multiple sites. Create a unique password for Ring (and everywhere else), and store that in either your browser’s password manager or one of the excellent third-party tools designed for this purpose. (They can also help you generate strong, unique passwords, too.)
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Don’t share your Ring login with anyone else. If you have to grant others access to your Ring devices, add them as a shared user, and make sure they’re using strong password security, too.
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Enable two-factor authentication. This is a no-brainer, and it can help keep attackers from breaking into your account even if they know your login and password. At the very least, you’ll get notified that a login attempt was made, and you can change your password to something unique and secure.
And that’s it. These security measures are hardly cumbersome; they should take an average person fewer than five minutes to set up, and help you prevent others from viewing the cameras you’ve set up all around your house.
Except that people are reporting their Ring devices being hacked when they have used unique, complex passwords not used anywhere else. So clearly there is somthing else happening.
My personal view is that smart devices are more hassle than they are worth, my only concession is our Nest smoke alarms, which are excellent, but I would never use any cloud based security systems. Our cams here at home are accessible only by use using port forwarding on the router and our own username/pwd combo, and we only have cams outside, not inside.