Woman horrified as stranger wakes her through Ring security camera: 'I can see you in the bed'

A Georgia woman was given a terrifying wake-up call by a man who hacked into her Ring security camera and began speaking to her in the middle of the night.

The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told WSB-TV she was in bed Monday night when an unidentified man called to her through the camera, which she and her boyfriend installed to keep an eye on their new puppy, Beau, during working hours.

In footage of the encounter, which a friend of the woman's shared on Twitter, the stranger can be heard clapping, calling to the puppy and telling the woman to "wake up!"

"Hello? Hello? Come here, puppy," he shouts.

"Hello? Hello?" he says after multiple ignored commands. "I can see you in the bed, come on, wake the f*** up."

Describing the incident to WSB-TV, the woman said that at first, she believed her boyfriend may have been the one accessing the Ring camera to check in on her and their puppy.

"I was laying there and had just put [the dog] in his crate, and I hear a cough over the Ring camera," she recalled. "I see the [Ring camera's] blue light come on, so I text my boyfriend saying, 'Why are you watching? We're laying down, and we're about to go to sleep.' And he's like, 'What are you talking about?'"

The couple says they reported the incident to Ring but still wants to make other people "aware" of possible security issues with their own home devices.

"We got this Ring camera thinking about one thing — watching our puppy," she told the station. "Not somebody looking at us."

In a similar incident, a Tennessee couple claimed a stranger hacked their Ring camera and used the technology to talk to their 8-year-old daughter while she was alone in her bedroom.

The family said they disconnected the camera shortly after and have plans to return it.

In a statement, Ring told In The Know that "customer trust is important to us and we take the security of our devices seriously."

"While we are still investigating this issue and are taking appropriate steps to protect our devices based on our investigation, we are able to confirm this incident is in no way related to a breach or compromise of Ring's security," the company continued.

"Due to the fact that customers often use the same username and password for their various accounts and subscriptions, bad actors often re-use credentials stolen or leaked from one service on other services," it explained. "As a precaution, we highly and openly encourage all Ring users to enable two-factor authentication on their Ring account, add Shared Users (instead of sharing login credentials), use strong passwords, and regularly change their passwords."

Advertisement