Ashley LeMay from Mississippi wants to warn other parents after a hacker managed to gain access to a Ring camera in her daughter’s room.
She told PEOPLE that she purchased the camera for her daughter last month but only less than a week later, her 8-year-old daughter heard a strange voice through the device.
The young girl, Alyssa, can be seen walking into the room when music started to play from the device. A strange male voice began talking to her.
“At first she was trying to figure out where the noise is coming from,” LeMay said. “It’s a man’s voice. At first she thought it was her dad; you can see her walk out the door and say, ‘I can’t hear you,’ speaking to her father.”
LeMay was not home when the incident happened and her husband was in the garage at that time.
In the video, the male voice can be heard repeatedly using a racial slur and telling the young girl to misbehave.
LeMay said that the stranger even tried to convince Alyssa that he was Santa Claus.
Her husband went into their daughter’s room after she heard her daughter shouted, ‘Mommy, mommy!’ as the stranger continued to talk to her.
“I really thought he was just kidding because that’s my worst nightmare,” LeMay expressed. “I watched part of the video because I’m like, ‘Surely he’s just messing with me’ — and then I heard the voice and that was all I needed to hear.”
A spokesperson for Ring told PEOPLE: “Customer trust is important to us and we take the security of our devices seriously. Our security team has investigated this incident and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network.”
The statement continued: “Recently, we were made aware of an incident where malicious actors obtained some Ring users’ account credentials (e.g., username and password) from a separate, external, non-Ring service and reused them to log in to some Ring accounts.
“Unfortunately, when the same username and password is reused on multiple services, it’s possible for bad actors to gain access to many accounts.”
It added: “Upon learning of the incident, we took appropriate actions to promptly block bad actors from known affected Ring accounts and affected users have been contacted. Consumers should always practice good password hygiene and we encourage Ring customers to change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication.”
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Replaced!