In a bone-chilling incident, a couple in the US was left stunned when a hacker broke into their connected home and started talking to them via camera, played vulgar music on the video system in the living room and even turned thermostat to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (over 32 degrees Celsius).
The couple had installed a Google Nest system (camera, doorbell and thermostat) in their house in 2018. On September 17, Samantha came home and found that the thermostat had been turned up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. She fixed it but the thermostat continued to go up, and a voice began speaking to the couple from a camera in the kitchen. The hacker later started playing vulgar music from the video system in the living room.
The Milwaukee couple are not alone. In January, a hacker took over an Illinois-based Indian-American couple’s Nest cameras and began talking to their toddler. “I was shocked to hear a deep, manly voice talking. My blood ran cold”, Arjun Sud told WBBM-TV. The hacker also hurled obscenities at Sud and his wife. Sud disconnected the cameras and contacted Nest which told him to use two-factor authentication (2FA) for added security. A California-based family also had a chilling experience when someone used their Nest camera’s speaker to warn of an impending missile strike from North Korea.
