FORNEY, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – Across the country, there have been several accounts of Ring cameras being hacked recently.
”The first thing that they heard was like a siren that went off,” said Lue Mayora of Forney.
Wednesday night, while Mayora and her husband were coming home from work, someone hacked into their Ring cameras.
They were shouting profanities, racial slurs and threats at their 9-year-old and 11-year-old children who they said ran out of the house in terror.
“I heard real, real screaming and I came out and said what’s going on,” Mayora’s neighbor Johnny Davila said. “They said someone is in house yelling they’re going to kill us.”
Mayora’s neighbor got his gun and ran next door thinking someone was inside the home.
As he heard the voice coming from the camera, he eventually realized it had been hacked.
“It made me so mad that they’re targeting our kids,” he said.
“They don’t want to sleep by themselves,” Mayora said. “They don’t want to be in the house.”
Mayora has now deactivated her Ring cameras and said she will be getting rid of them this weekend.
She said representatives for the company do not think their system was compromised, but instead believe the hacker gained access to their passwords.
“I think that they need to figure out how that is so we can get that info to the police and the right steps can be taken,” she said. “There should be repercussions for the trauma that my kids are facing.”
Mayora is now working with police, but says they’ve told her it might be difficult to track down the person responsible.
Tech security experts say your best defense for something like this is changing your password often and enabling two-factor authentication.
With that, your account can only be accessed after you enter a code sent to your phone.
