Tag: ‘Swatting’

FBI seeing more ‘swatting’ crimes as people hack into Ring doorbell cameras

January 9, 2023/in Internet Security

Ring cameras can be a great safety tool, but the device can be manipulated by criminals if you don’t take precautions.

Thieves can gain access to your security cameras and even make false police reports.

In one home, a strange voice comes over a Ring camera in a little girl’s bedroom. The family’s security system had been hacked.

In another instance, police knocked on the door of a home after responding to a fake call of a disturbance.

Both are examples of what the FBI calls “Ring swatting.”

Now two men accused of carrying out a nationwide swatting spree and hacking into dozens of Ring cameras have been indicted by a federal grand jury in California.

One of the incidents allegedly occurred in Darien, Illinois, about a year ago. When police responded to the house, they found nothing going on and determined it to be a hoax.

“The cameras are vulnerable because they are not properly secured,” said Cyrus Walker, a cyber security expert with Chicago-based Data Defenders LLC.

According to Walker, you have to not only secure the cameras but the internet network that allows them to connect to each other and the outside world.

“The one thing I recommend is that users make sure their wireless networks are as secure as they can be, which means that they have strong passwords,” Walker said. “That they are not broadcasting their SSID. That they have encryption enabled to the highest degree and that they separate the networks.”

Walker said cameras are not the only way in for hackers. TVs, game systems and even refrigerators can be connected to the internet and can be compromised.

He said the first thing you should do when you buy a new connected device is change its default security settings.

“The device that you bought, someone else bought also, and they have those same default settings,” Walker said. “So it is extremely important that when you crack the tape on that box and you plug it up, the very first thing you do is that you change the username and the password on that device so that only you have access to that device at that point.”

Cybersecurity, Walker said, isn’t difficult, but it does require people to do more than just plug in their devices and turn them on.

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Ring Cameras Hacked in ‘Swatting’ Scheme

December 20, 2022/in Computer Security

The Department of Justice said on Monday that two men have been charged in a scheme that involved hacking Ring security cameras outside homes, drawing and sometimes taunting police, and then broadcasting the antics on social media.

Amazon bought security company Ring in 2018, and the product quickly became one of the company’s “signature” security products for the home, per The Guardian. Ring offers products like doorbells, security cameras and home security systems, with relevant data and controls accessible through the company’s app.

Critics and researchers say the Ring cameras are used to surveil gig economy drivers and delivery people and that they give law enforcement too much power to survey everyday life.

It’s unclear what the men’s motivation was. The two charged are Kya Christian Nelson, who is 21, from Racine, Wisconsin and “currently incarcerated in Kentucky in an unrelated case,” per the DOJ, and James Thomas Andrew McCarty, who is 20 and from Charlotte, North Carolina.

In this case, the two men used the Ring cameras to do something known as “swatting,” where one pretends there is an emergency to draw a large group of police or other first responders.

The pair would hack people’s Yahoo email accounts, then their Ring accounts, find their addresses, call law enforcement to the home with a bogus story, and then stream police’s response to the call. Often, they would harass the first responders at the same time using Ring device capabilities.

For example, “A hoax telephone call was placed to the West Covina [California] Police Department purporting to originate from the victim’s residence and posing as a minor child reporting her parents drinking and shooting guns inside the residence of the victim’s parents,” the Justice Department wrote.

The pair conducted this scheme a dozen times across the country in a one-week span, the department noted. The two men were indicted by a grand jury. Nelson faces two counts of accessing a computer without…

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Watching a ‘Swatting’ slowly unfold within sight of the Boston Marathon starting line

April 5, 2015/in Internet Security

Approaching the center of town to pick up pizza last night, I saw a half-dozen police vehicles blocking off Main Street. I pulled into a parking lot both to figure out how to get to our dinner and to find out what was going on.

The instant a bystander told me what he had heard, I knew this police operation was almost certainly the result of a hoax known as Swatting, which starts with a fake 911 call reporting a non-existent life-threatening situation. It’s become an epidemic of late, targeting celebrities and online gamers, in particular.

While police had no choice but to take the threat seriously – more on that in a minute — I was confident this was a hoax for two reasons: I have been reporting on the topic recently and the rumored details of the 911 call seemed far-fetched: a man claimed to be holed up in the closed Hopkinton Public Library with two hostages and a bomb. (Not only did I believe this was a Swatting, I said it out loud, so the editor of a local news site called HopNews decided I was worth interviewing.)

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Network World Paul McNamara

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