Horrified mum says stranger 'spoke to her son for weeks' after hacking baby monitor

Baby monitors are a staple of any new parent’s toolkit, designed to put mums and dads’ minds at ease.

And yet, one mother found her monitor the opposite of reassuring after she was led to believe that a stranger had hacked their device and was using it to speak to him.

Influencer Kurin Adele made the frightening claim in a TikTok posted on Saturday.

In the clip, which racked up 6.1 million views in three days, Adele told viewers that she’d noticed over “the past couple of weeks to a couple of months” that her son had been unplugging his bedroom camera.

On Friday night, she asked her husband to plug the device back in which, to her surprise, made her little boy very upset.

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“My son starts crying and he's like, ‘I don't want my camera plugged in, I don't want my camera plugged in,’” she recounted.

“‘Someone talks to me at night and it scares me, someone wakes me up and talks to me and I'm scared.’”

The content creator said she and her husband “looked at each other completely terrified” before reassuring their child that he was safe and they wouldn’t be plugging the camera back in.

She then explained that they immediately went to change the password to the app for the device, at which point they received a message from its manufacturer, Owlet.

The pop-up read: “This password has appeared in a data leak, which puts this account at high risk for compromise. You should change your password immediately.”

Adele shared her fury at the alleged invasion of privacy@kurinadele/TikTok

Furious, Adele continued: “Who the heck knows how long someone has had our password and has been messing with my son? Owlet never notified us.

“The only reason we didn't know about this sooner is because our son thought it was us talking to him, so whoever was talking to him was telling him that it was his mum and dad.”

She ended the clip by urging fellow parents to ditch their wifi cameras, claiming that “people are hacking into baby monitors left and right just to mess with people”.

Her video racked up more than 850,000 likes and 6,400 comments as fellow TikTokers rushed to share their horror at Adele’s discovery.

“10th video I have seen of a baby monitor getting hacked,” one wrote.

“As someone who designed networks for a living, I would NEVER recommend a wifi enabled camera. They're so easy to hack,” said another.

“I’m a law student and we did a trip to the cyber police department and the guy also said to never get ‘smart’ baby monitors,” added a third.

On Monday, Adele shared an update, saying Owlet had replied to her complaint about the whole affair after she sent them a “hate email”.

“They responded with a very dismissive email, basically telling me that their data is super encrypted and there's no way that someone could hack in, but they'd like to look into it further,” she said.

However, she went on: “About 20 minutes ago, I got an email directly from Owlet, It looks like they saw my video.”

She went on to say that she felt “a little bit bummed” that the “only reason they're reaching out to me is because I have a platform and my video went viral,” before admitting that she was still “excited to see how they rectify the situation”.

The mother-of-two, who’s expecting her third child, said she was keen to know whether they’d be able to find out who logged into their account, adding that she’d keep her followers posted on any updates.

Owlet responded to indy100's request for comment with the following statement:

"Owlet takes customer safety and security very seriously. We’ve been in contact directly with the customer since Friday, May 5th and have concluded our investigation into this reported incident. Our team has reviewed all available data on our end including firmware, mobile, and server logs and we are very confident that there was no suspicious activity. All access to the customer's cameras came from the devices owned by the family, and we have no reason to believe there was improper access by external IP addresses based upon our review.

"Further, Owlet has zero confirmed cases of our cameras being compromised, nor have we identified any failure in our security protocols. As shown in the video the customer shared, she received a general iOS warning from Apple on her iPhone that a password used for multiple accounts appeared in a larger data leak. This was not a warning or notification from Owlet. Owlet does not store customer passwords, but if at any time we become aware of a data breach, we will promptly inform our customers.

"We encourage all customers to be vigilant and use password best practices with all devices. Any customer’s online profile can be vulnerable if a user has not set up an appropriately secure password or if they are using the same password across multiple accounts. We encourage users to change their passwords regularly and, if they receive a pop-up from iOS or Android about a potential data leak, to change their password(s) immediately."

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