This is a nasty surprise. Some owners of connected surveillance camera Wyze were able to see inside strangers’ homes due to a bug.
This is an ad that Wyze could have done without. The American company recently found itself in controversy due to a server bug which would have allowed several Internet users to access photo captures from surveillance cameras that did not belong to them. And this isn’t the first time this has happened.
When a bug violates privacy
As noted by the site The Verge, several testimonials on Reddit report an alert coming from their Wyze application warning them of movement detected in their home. Problem is, the attached photo is from someone else’s surveillance cameras. For 3 days, the Wyze forum has seen this type of messages flourish, accompanied by legitimate panic.
According to Wyze’s communication, this would be due to an AWS bug (the Amazon servers rented by the company) which would have “corrupted some user data» and would therefore have allowed certain users to “see image thumbnails from cameras that do not belong to them“. The company indicates that it has, for the moment, identified 14 cases and has forced the disconnection of numerous users.in order to be as careful as possible“. Just to be reassuring, Wyze still clarified that “live video streams were not viewable“.
An inglorious history
Unfortunately for the company, this “bug” arrives when its reputation is already seriously damaged. In September 2023, a problem of the same type had already caused a reaction on Reddit. Unfortunately, during this bug, some Internet users did indeed have access to live video feeds coming from unknown cameras.
Even more worrying, in 2022, The Verge revealed that a vulnerability in Wyze’s computer systems allowed malicious hackers to connect to the video feed of victims’ cameras, without this causing any alert. Rather than communicating about it transparently, the company allegedly buried the information for three years until a report from BitDefender made it all public.
Difficult for the American company to maintain public trust after these multiple incidents. Even the theoretical threat of an average Internet user having access to the most intimate corners of their home is enough to seriously put the interest of such gadgets into perspective.
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Source : The Verge
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