picture:
Wiz
A serious mishap at a security camera provider allowed users to peer into other users' homes.
no time? Blue News sums it up for you
- Strangers were able to access surveillance cameras from provider Wyze.
- The cloud service mixed user and device identifiers.
- This is the second incident in as many months in which agents have been able to look into other customers' bedrooms.
A bug in security camera provider Wyze has led to 13,000 customers being able to see photos and videos from other customers' homes. Like many security camera providers, Wyze offers a cloud service that allows you to view photos and video from your home remotely.
After the cloud service failed for a short period, Wyze had a serious mishap when it restarted. Due to the high load when starting the systems, a cache problem occurred, so the device IDs were assigned to the wrong client IDs.
1,500 customers took a look
This enabled about 13,000 customers to view other people's apartments and homes. About 1,500 of them did, Wise admits. It blames “third party” software for this unfortunate incident. Additionally, 99 percent of his customers were unaffected.
According to the Ars Technica report, Wyze users are still angry and have canceled the service, especially since it was the second such case in just a few months. There was a similar issue in September, but at the time outsiders could only see ten users' private cameras.
