Hijacked baby monitor in Ohio stalks terrified tot

Experiences similar to 10-month-old Emma’s ordeal have been reported several times during the past year, as hackers find weaknesses in all sorts of wireless home devices.

After awakening to a stranger’s voice one night, mother Heather Schreck checked on the tyke through her cellphone, which receives streaming video from Emma’s monitor.

“Heather saw that the camera was moving erratically, when it is only meant to move if following the child or someone else walking about the room,” the Daily Mail reports.

Around the time of the shifting, she heard a voice start screaming at her daughter, Heather told Fox 19.

The girl’s dad, “Adam bolted to Emma's room, and watched as the camera turned from his petrified daughter and pointed at him,” the Daily Mail reports.

The unidentified man began yelling “bad things and obscenities” at the father, the article adds.

So, Adam unplugged the camera. It was then that he realized the $70-worth Foscam IP Camera perched above Emma’s crib had been breached. 

Security analysts warn that criminals can gain a foothold into sensitive data on a victim’s home network through such compromised baby cams. This Foscam camera had a known vulnerability that could have been fixed with a software update.  But the Shreck’s didn’t know – until it was too late.

ThreatWatch is a regularly updated catalog of data breaches successfully striking every sector of the globe, as reported by journalists, researchers and the victims themselves.