Baby Monitor Hacked? Real Camera Leaks at Wyze, eufy, Ring and More
Updated
A baby monitor or home camera points at the most private rooms in your house, all day long. When that footage gets out, there's no taking it back. Every case below is documented by news reports or government announcements.
Wyze: other families' cameras showed up in the app
In February 2024, after a cloud outage, Wyze cameras came back online all at once — and roughly 13,000 users were shown thumbnails from cameras that weren't theirs. 1,504 of them tapped on those images. The cause was on Wyze's side: a caching library it had recently added mixed up which camera belonged to which account (The Record). The same outlet notes a similar incident had been reported the previous September.
eufy: "private and secure," but not encrypted
In January 2025, the New York Attorney General secured $450,000 from companies selling eufy cameras. The investigation found that video streams could be accessed by anyone with the relevant link, without logging in, and that part of the connection wasn't encrypted at all (NY Attorney General).
Ring: employees could watch customer videos
In 2023 the FTC alleged that Ring let employees and contractors access customers' private videos; in 2024 it sent more than $5.6 million in refunds to affected customers. Details are in our baby monitor hacking guide.
It's not just the US
- South Korea: In October 2024, Korea's media regulator blocked access to 260 videos taken by hacked IP cameras in homes, offices and karaoke rooms and spread on overseas adult sites. The regulator said poorly secured Chinese-made IP cameras were frequently hacked — and that victims usually have no idea (Newsis, Korean). In December 2025, police arrested four people for hacking around 120,000 home cameras (IBTimes).
- Japan: A June 2025 study by BitSight found over 40,000 cameras worldwide streaming live footage openly on the internet. The US topped the list with about 14,000; Japan was second (Mynavi, Japanese).
What these leaks have in common
- Default settings left in place. Factory passwords and wrong sharing settings made many cameras viewable by anyone.
- Footage passing through or stored on company servers. At Wyze and eufy, one mistake on the company's side put thousands of homes at risk at once — something no strong password on your end can prevent.
- Nobody notices. The camera keeps working normally, so a leak can go on for a long time.
What to check on your camera today
- Replace the default password with a long, unique one
- Turn on two-factor authentication and automatic updates
- Remove old shared accounts; switch off any guest or public viewing mode
- Think twice before putting a camera in a bedroom or bathroom
- Search the brand's history of security incidents before you buy
For the full checklist, see how to protect your baby monitor from hacking.
Why Momseye starts with "don't keep the footage"
These cases show that however careful you are, footage sitting on a company's servers is another door into your home. So Momseye was built differently from day one:
- Video is never stored on our servers — there's nothing there to steal
- The stream is encrypted, so no one in the middle can watch it
- Event recordings (PRO) are saved on the camera phone itself, not in a cloud
- No new hardware: an old phone in your drawer becomes the camera
Learn more in what Momseye is, or get started with turning an old phone into a baby monitor.