No privacy: Strangers could have been watching your home security camera
If you’ve purchased one of Google’s Nest Cams second-hand, the previous owner might have been watching your movements for months.
New claims have found that previous owners of the camera could still use an app to look at footage from the device even after a factory reset had been used.
Nest Indoor Cameras linked with the Wink hub device were vulnerable to this issue, with the flaw first raised in Facebook groups for Wink products.
The New York Times company Wirecutter did its own testing of the flaw and discovered that the decommissioned Nest Cam Indoor was still viewable via a previously linked Wink hub account.
“Instead of a video stream, it was a series of still images snapped every several seconds,” the report read.
Google were quick to issue a fix to the devices.
“We were recently made aware of an issue affecting some Nest cameras connected to third-party partner services via Works with Nest,” the company said in a statement.
“We’ve since rolled out a fix for this issue that will update automatically, so if you own a Nest camera, there’s no need to take any action.”
However, it is still unclear how many people were impacted by the breach. This also raises questions as to whether or not Nest Cam streams are vulnerable to other third-party smart home hubs.
There is also no data as to how long the bug has been impacting Nest Cam devices.