What if someone was watching your home through your own security camera? In this video, we explore 5 of the most disturbing real-life home security camera hacks, where cybercriminals gained unauthorized access to smart cameras, invaded people's privacy, and left families shaken. Learn how these incidents happened and discover practical tips to help protect your own devices from similar threats.
#HomeSecurity #CyberSecurity #SecurityCamera #Hacking #Privacy #SmartHome #TechSafety #InternetSafety #CyberCrime #TrueStories
#HomeSecurity #CyberSecurity #SecurityCamera #Hacking #Privacy #SmartHome #TechSafety #InternetSafety #CyberCrime #TrueStories
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00:00On the evening of January 20, 2019, 29-year-old Arjun Sud and his wife Jessica put their 7-month
00:06-old
00:06son Oliver to bed in his nursery at their home in Lake Barrington, Illinois. What they didn't
00:10know was that someone else was already in the room with them. It was getting late and Arjun
00:14had work in the morning. Like many busy parents, Arjun had set up a Nest baby monitor to check in
00:19on Oliver from his phone without getting out of bed. The Nest thermostat was set to 72 so the
00:24room would stay comfortable through the night. Arjun had spent roughly $4,000 outfitting the
00:29house with Nest products over the years. 17 cameras placed throughout the home and around
00:34the exterior with two smart thermostats and a full security system. He was an avid user of the
00:39technology and clearly trusted it enough to build much of his home security around it.
00:43But shortly after putting Oliver down, Arjun was standing in the hallway outside the nursery when
00:48he heard something from inside the room. It sounded like a deep male voice speaking directly to his son
00:53through the camera's speaker. He rushed into the room, but no one was there. He thought maybe it
00:58was just an interference with the baby monitor. Stuff like this isn't new, and many electronic
01:02devices can pick up distortion of some kind. Still, to be safe, they brought Oliver downstairs.
01:08On the way down, Jessica noticed he was extremely distressed and sweating through his clothes,
01:13and when she glanced at the thermostat, the temperature had been cranked up to a dangerous
01:1690 degrees. But before they could process what was happening, the voice came back. This time,
01:22it was coming through a different Nest camera downstairs in the living area, and it was speaking directly to
01:26them. The voice was cursing, hurling racial slurs, and taunting them in real time as it watched them
01:32through the live feed. When Arjun looked directly at the lens, the voice asked,
01:36Why are you looking at me? I see you watching me.
01:38At that point, Arjun realized someone had hacked into their Nest account, which he used to control
01:43every camera, thermostat, and every inch of the security system he had spent thousands of dollars
01:48building to protect his family. Arjun's first instinct was to yell back at the camera,
01:52by it, he composed himself and started questioning the intruder through the two-way audio.
01:58Yes, I'm here. Come, come.
02:01I know you're here. Who are you?
02:04He tried to extract information on the hacker's whereabouts, asking who they were and which country
02:09they were from. Who is this? Are you just sitting at a... Are you just sitting at your computer
02:16there? Into my account? Where are you? Which, uh, which country? The hacker went quiet without
02:28identifying himself or explaining why he had done any of it.
02:32Yeah, who are you? Come on. Be a man. Speak up.
02:40Nothing?
02:43Nothing to say?
02:45The couple disconnected their interior camera in the house and called both the police and Nest
02:50customer support. Nest responded by putting the blame on Arjun. They told him the hack had happened
02:55because he had reused a password from another site that had been breached, and because he hadn't
02:59enabled two-factor authentication, a feature Arjun didn't even know existed. Now, technically,
03:04they did have a point. Reusing passwords is a real security risk, and two-factor authentication
03:09probably would have stopped this. But digging deeper into this, I found the suit family weren't
03:14the only victims attacked through Nest devices. After researching similar incidents, a dozen more cases
03:19just as chilling came up. For example, on the same day the suits were dealing with their hacker,
03:24January 20, 2019, a family in Orinda, California, had a fake ballistic missile attack warning come
03:30blasting through their Nest camera, telling them three nuclear missiles were heading for Los Angeles,
03:34Chicago, and Ohio.
03:36It came on like the emergency sounds of an Amber Alert, say, and then a man's voice announced that
03:43North Korea had launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the United States.
03:48Their young son hid under the living room rug, thinking the country was under attack.
03:52And about a month earlier, on December 17, 2018, parents in Houston woke to the haunting sound
03:58of a stranger's voice coming from their four-month-old's nursery, threatening to kidnap their son and
04:02ordering them to turn off the bedroom lights.
04:05He turned that camera on and told us, said, turn off the light, and then said,
04:10I'm going to kidnap your baby, I'm in your baby's room.
04:12In every single case, Nest responded by blaming the customers.
04:15So, why did this keep happening?
04:18You see, Nest had quietly added two-factor authentication back in 2017, and barely told anyone.
04:23Arjun didn't even know the feature existed because Nest never told him.
04:26It took until May 2020, well over a year after all of this happened, for the company to finally make
04:31it mandatory.
04:32Which feels like a quiet admission that leaving the security entirely up to the customer was never the right call.
04:38But, for Arjun, the scariest part wasn't about how the hacker got in.
04:42It was how Nest's cameras gave no real warning when someone else was watching the feed.
04:46A handful of them had a small blue light, but it only switched on when the intruder started talking.
04:51A hacker could watch and listen for hours, and the family would never know.
04:55The only reason the Suths knew they'd been compromised was because the hacker chose to speak.
05:00In the end, the hacker was never identified, and no arrest was ever made.
05:07On the afternoon of April 23, 2020, Shawna Dottie received a phone call from her home security company, ADT.
05:14They had called to tell her that for the last six years, every dollar she had paid them to keep
05:18her family safe had done the exact opposite.
05:21Back in 2014, Shawna and her husband Randy were living with their young son in the suburbs of the Dallas
05:26-Fort Worth area,
05:27and wanted the peace of mind to keep an eye on the house from anywhere.
05:30ADT's pulse system with indoor cameras, motion alerts, and a cell phone app sounded like exactly what they were after.
05:37A few weeks after they placed the order, a technician from ADT showed up at their front door.
05:41He looked at the layout and mounted a wide-angle indoor camera that covered most of the ground floor,
05:45the family room, the entryway, the dining area, and the staircase.
05:49The lens also reached into the master bedroom and the corner of the bathroom.
05:53He walked Shawna through the app on her phone.
05:55Before he left, he told her he needed to add his own email to the account, only briefly to check
06:00if the connection was working.
06:01For the next six years, the system worked exactly the way it was supposed to,
06:05and the Dotties had no reason to think about that afternoon again.
06:08Until they received that call from ADT on April 23rd, 2020.
06:12The employee calling told Shawna that the technician who had installed her camera back in 2014
06:17had granted himself remote access to it on the installing day, and that that access was never removed.
06:22He had been using it to view footage from inside the Dotties' home ever since.
06:26When Shawna asked what he had been seeing, the employee had no answers.
06:29They couldn't name him and wouldn't say how many times he had logged in.
06:33Seven hours is a long time, but we're talking seven years.
06:38You don't know what to think.
06:40So you find yourself just trying to go back, like, okay, what were we doing during this time?
06:47Unfortunately, the Dotties weren't the only family getting the ADT call.
06:51They were one of more than 200 plus.
06:53A few weeks earlier, another ADT customer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area was going through their Pulse account settings
06:59when they noticed an email attached to it that didn't belong to anyone in the house.
07:03Naturally, they called ADT to ask what it was doing there.
07:05When the company looked into it, they found that the same email was attached to 220 separate customer accounts
07:11across the metropolitan area.
07:13And every one of those systems had been installed or serviced by the same technician at some point.
07:18Which raised the obvious question, how does one technician end up signed into 220 homes?
07:24The answer was buried in ADT's own software.
07:27Technicians are allowed to temporarily attach their personal email to a customer's account during install.
07:32It's a diagnostic feature meant to verify the camera feed before they leave.
07:36So every time he serviced or installed a system, he either gave the same diagnostic excuse or didn't bother explaining
07:42at all.
07:42But he never removed his email, so the Pulse app on his personal phone kept him signed in as a
07:47co-owner of these homes.
07:49Now, some could argue this was just sloppy work, a tech forgetting to clean up after himself.
07:54Once or twice, sure, but more than 200 times is not a coincidence.
07:58So, how did this slip past ADT for so long?
08:01It turned out ADT didn't have any system in place to catch such a massive breach of privacy.
08:06The company never alerted its customers and didn't even have an automated check flagging the same email showing up on
08:11dozens of accounts.
08:13Which meant he could keep logging in whenever he wanted.
08:16In April 2016, the same technician installed a system at the home of a couple with two young daughters.
08:21The camera covered the living room and the kitchen.
08:24Court records would later show he logged into that account 322 times.
08:28At another household, one where five children under the age of 18 lived, he logged in 361 times.
08:36In September 2017, he set up a Pulse system for the Preddy family.
08:40Their teenage daughter, Alexia, wasn't comfortable with indoor cameras, and she told her mother this on the day of the
08:45installation.
08:46But the ADT technician assured them that the system was perfectly safe.
08:50Years later, when the full scope of the breach came to light, ADT found that he had accessed the Preddy
08:55family's live footage almost 100 times during the years Alexia was still a teenager.
09:00Court filings would later show the wide-angle lens in its placement allowed him to view her undressed, getting ready
09:05for bed, and during moments of physical intimacy.
09:08This technician was Talos Foro Aviles.
09:11He was 35 years old, married, and the father of five children of his own.
09:15He'd been with ADT for 17 years, and by 2020 was working as a senior supervisor in the Dallas-Fort
09:21Worth region.
09:22On May 18, 2020, Shauna Dottie and Alexia Preddy each filed federal lawsuits against ADT,
09:28accusing the company of allowing Aviles to exploit its Pulse system and spy on customers through their own home cameras.
09:34Soon after, more lawsuits followed from other victims.
09:37In the federal case, Aviles admitted that he took note of households with women he found attractive,
09:41and repeatedly targeted homes of young women and married couples with daughters.
09:45He would open the Pulse app on his personal phone, scroll through the list of homes attached to his email,
09:50and watch for live footage of any private moments.
09:53Across the four and a half years covered by his federal plea agreement,
09:56prosecutors counted more than 9,600 unauthorized logins across roughly 200 accounts.
10:02That works out to five or six logins a day, every day, for over four years.
10:07Aviles pleaded guilty to computer fraud in January 2021, and was sentenced to 52 months in federal prison that June.
10:14ADT had revoked his access to all 220 accounts months earlier,
10:18but the only person who knew exactly what he had seen, and in which homes, was Aviles himself.
10:27On the evening of September 30, 2017, a young Dutch woman named Rilana Hamer
10:32came home from the supermarket and started unpacking her groceries.
10:35She lived alone in a small house in Bremen, a quiet town in the eastern Netherlands, with her dog.
10:41Rilana had recently bought a small indoor security camera from her local discount store for around 35 euros.
10:47It was a Maxter ACT-IPC-01, a white plastic unit with a motorized base that could rotate across the
10:54room.
10:54She set up the camera on a shelf in her living room, figuring it would be easy to check on
10:58her dog throughout the day.
10:59The camera also had a built-in speaker, which let her talk to the dog even when she wasn't home.
11:03That evening, she was putting her groceries away when she heard a low, mechanical voice from the living room.
11:09When she went to look, she saw the camera rotating on its base, slowly turning back and forth on its
11:14own.
11:15Her phone was the only thing she used to control it, and that was on her bed in the next
11:18room.
11:19Figuring it was just an updating glitch, she went back to the kitchen.
11:23But a few minutes later, the sound came back.
11:25This time, the camera turned and pointed directly at her, and a man's voice came through the speaker.
11:31It said,
11:32Bonjour, madam.
11:33Staying composed, Rilana asked who was there, but no one answered.
11:36To see if the voice would speak again, Rilana moved to the side and noticed that the camera was following
11:41her.
11:41That's when the voice came through again, this time saying,
11:45Hello, madam. Is everything alright?
11:47She immediately ran across the room and pulled the plug from the socket.
11:50Later that evening, a friend came over for dinner.
11:52Rilana told her what had happened, and the two of them decided to test the camera again.
11:57They placed it back on the table and plugged it in as Rilana held her phone to record.
12:01It took less than a minute before the camera rotated on its own and found her again.
12:11What did you do?
12:15Soon, the voice came back.
12:19It's hot.
12:20No.
12:21Get the f*** out of my house now.
12:24Shut the f*** up.
12:26Hola.
12:27Shut the f*** up of my house now.
12:29Go away.
12:33Hola, señorita.
12:34Yeah, f*** you.
12:39Rilana posted the video on her Facebook account, where it went viral immediately.
12:43By the start of the next week, Dutch National News had picked up the story.
12:46When a tech journalist looked into Rilana's video days later, the explanation turned out
12:51to be disturbingly simple.
12:52Every camera the manufacturer shipped came with the same default password, 123, along with
12:58the device ID printed on a sticker underneath each unit.
13:01With just those two things, and the free app, anyone in the world could connect to any of
13:05these cameras, watch the live feed, listen through the microphone, and talk through the speaker.
13:10Looking up the manual for this camera, it does mention that the default password is weak and
13:14recommends changing it before use.
13:16But nowhere in the app itself, the thing you actually interact with during setup, did it ever
13:21tell the users to do that.
13:22Few people read the full manual for a 35 euro camera from a discount store.
13:27You just download the app and start.
13:29So Rilana never knew that she had to change the password, and that she was far from the
13:33only one.
13:34When the tech journalist tried connecting to other cameras from the same manufacturer,
13:38he got into four unsuspecting households within minutes, using nothing but the manual
13:42and the free app.
13:43Each one of those people, just like Rilana, had no idea anyone else was watching.
13:51In late 2010, Ferial Nijem woke up in the middle of the night to heavy metal music playing
13:56at full volume through every speaker in her house.
13:59Confused and disoriented, she didn't know how it had turned on.
14:03And despite her trying, the volume level didn't go down, as if someone else was controlling
14:07the sound system.
14:08But there was no one home except her that night.
14:11Ferial was a Canadian fashion model who had spent most of her adult life around cameras.
14:15She had walked at the Berlin Film Festival in the mid-2000s, and built a career where
14:19she was looked at on her own terms.
14:21By her late 30s, she was in a long-term relationship with a partner who lived in the States.
14:26He was, in her words, quietly controlling.
14:29According to her,
14:30He wouldn't just touch base with a text.
14:32He would call me on FaceTime and ask to say hi to the person I was with.
14:35At the time, she thought it was attentiveness.
14:37And she trusted him enough that she eventually moved into his home in the US.
14:41It was an impressively designed house with a high-tech smart home system, which covered
14:46everything on the property, from lights, heating, blinds, security cameras, to the sound system.
14:53All of it ran through a single, integrated platform her partner had set up.
14:57For someone who'd spent her career around cameras and production sets, living with so
15:01much technology around didn't feel unusual.
15:03But sometime during the 2010s, the relationship started to fall apart.
15:07Her partner moved to a different city, while Ferial stayed behind in his house,
15:11with his credentials still running everything around her.
15:14And that's when things started getting strange.
15:16She'd fall asleep at a normal hour and get jolted awake by sound blasting through every room.
15:22You're asleep in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden, over the sound system,
15:27comes this blaring music that startles you awake.
15:30That's what would happen to me.
15:31By the time she was on her feet, it would cut out, just as suddenly as it had started.
15:35And she'd be left standing in a dark, silent house with no explanation.
15:40Soon enough, the lights started to behave in a similar way.
15:42She'd switch them off for bed, and they'd flick back on,
15:45sometimes flickering for several seconds before stabilizing.
15:48She would experience the same with her TVs, which would switch on by themselves,
15:52and shut back off as soon as she got near the remote.
15:54At first, she tried telling herself it was just the system acting up.
15:58It was a big house, and every inch of it was wired with technology.
16:01So, some level of glitching was expected, but even then, she couldn't help shake off the feeling that something was
16:07off.
16:07In an interview with CBC's Marketplace, she said,
16:10It's almost as if the house is haunted.
16:12Sadly, in a way, she was right.
16:14It started when she began receiving messages from her ex.
16:17They mentioned things he should have never known,
16:19like what she had been wearing earlier, or who she had been with when she walked through the front door.
16:24He'd been using every piece of smart tech in the house to watch her and remind her he was still
16:28there.
16:29On more than one occasion, he'd also sent her direct threats.
16:32Get out of my house.
16:34I need you to stop manipulating the lights.
16:38I'm not touching the lights.
16:40What is wrong? Just can you please leave me alone?
16:43You're not supposed to call me.
16:44I'm not bothering you.
16:46I am going after the dogs.
16:49And then I'm going after you.
16:51For someone who had spent her entire life controlling exactly how and when she was seen,
16:56being watched in her own home without ever knowing felt like a different kind of violation entirely.
17:02He was able to monitor me, you know, using our security surveillance cameras,
17:07even remotely from thousands of miles away.
17:10Ferial tried to shut the system down,
17:12but her partner had configured everything from the start and held all the login credentials.
17:16Left with no other options, she contacted the local police and explained everything.
17:21Unfortunately, the response she received only deepened the sense that she had nowhere left to turn.
17:25The home wasn't in her name, and as far as the responding officers were concerned,
17:29that was where the matter ended.
17:30In the end, Ferial realized that her only real way out was to leave the home behind entirely.
17:35She gathered her dogs and made her way to a local women's shelter.
17:42On the 8th of August, 2025, a woman named Brenda took a Ring doorbell camera off its mount
17:47and brought it inside her house to charge.
17:49It was something she did every few weeks.
17:51The camera ran on a battery, and recharging it was a routine part of owning one.
17:55But this time, she noticed something strange about the camera.
17:59The blue ring of light around the lens was on.
18:01On a Ring doorbell, that light only comes on when the camera is actively streaming,
18:06recording, or in the middle of a live two-way call with someone signed into the account.
18:10None of which should have been the case while the device was unmounted and sitting indoors.
18:14So, Brenda picked it up to see what was going on.
18:16And that's when she started hearing a voice coming through the doorbell speaker.
18:42Someone was speaking through the device in real time.
18:45And by the way they were laughing,
18:46it's clear that it wasn't someone who'd accidentally connected to the wrong camera.
18:50Whoever it was, they were taking their time terrorizing Brenda.
18:54Brenda pulled out her phone and managed to record only some of the interaction.
18:58But the voice went silent within a few seconds, and the blue light switched off shortly after.
19:02She later posted the video on her TikTok account.
19:05The comment section was flooded with people who couldn't believe how easily someone could gain access
19:09to a Ring device, along with others sharing similar experiences.
19:13One comment read,
19:26By now, the pattern should sound familiar.
19:29Just like the Maxter cameras Rilana had set up in her living room,
19:33a doorbell camera is only as secure as the password protecting the account behind it.
19:37A weak or reused password is often all it takes.
19:40And if you look at every case in this video,
19:42this exact vulnerability keeps showing up,
19:45regardless of the brand's price or how trusted the company is.
19:48So, that's also what most likely happened here.
19:51Now, as I was researching this case,
19:53I found multiple people in the comments suggesting a different theory.
19:56They argued that what Brenda heard wasn't a stalker at all,
19:59but signal interference from someone else's baby monitor bleeding into her doorbell,
20:03and that the voice on the audio sounded a lot like a dad talking to his baby.
20:07This theory sounds plausible at first.
20:10Wireless devices do cross signals all the time,
20:12and analog baby monitors are notorious for picking up audio from neighboring devices
20:16operating on similar radio frequencies.
20:18But Ring devices aren't analog-based.
20:21They work by connecting to your home's Wi-Fi network
20:24and streaming audio and video through Ring's own encrypted servers.
20:27So, any sound that comes through the doorbell speaker
20:30has to be sent through the Ring app first,
20:32by someone logged into the account.
20:34In other words, for a man's voice to come through Brenda's doorbell speaker
20:38clearly and in full conversation,
20:40someone had to be on the other end of the Ring app,
20:43with full access to her device.
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