Nanny cams and baby monitors are a staple in many homes with infants and small children, but they are also susceptible to hackers. Ashley Stanley is a professional nanny who said someone hacked into the family nanny cam and began talking to her and the baby she cares for.
"I heard someone talking on
the camera monitor and was like, 'Maybe my bosses are playing a trick on me or something,'" Stanley said.
The home's Wi-Fi connection was password-protected, but the family's nanny cam was not.
"You don't want someone else to be able to see inside your home, especially when you're using it for security purposes," said Andre Goodlow, an agent with Best Buy's Geek Squad. "You think that's to help secure it, and it's actually opening the door to those with bad intentions."
Goodlow said to prevent others from hacking into your system, you must do two things. First, secure your router.
"The router itself has its own security settings, so you have to make sure you change those, as well as any Wi-Fi signal you tell it to create," Goodlow said. "So you have two levels of security straight out of the box. That's what you need to set up."
After that, you must also change the password on all devices and/or cameras.
"If you don't change these," Goodlow said, "anyone who is walking around can log into your computer, change your actual Wi-Fi signal, the name of it, and lock you out of your own device."
Goodlow said if your baby monitor allows cloud streaming, set up a separate password for that, because it can also be hacked.
He also recommends picking a difficult password to crack, and not something like a birthday or your home address.