Last week, co-founder David Crosby said that “so far” the company had identified 14 people who were able to briefly see into a stranger’s property because they were shown an image from someone else’s Wyze camera. Now we’re being told that number of affected customers has ballooned to 13,000.
The revelation came from an email sent to customers entitled “An Important Security Message from Wyze,” in which the company copped to the breach and apologized, while also attempting to lay some of the blame on its web hosting provider AWS.
“The outage originated from our partner AWS and took down Wyze devices for several hours early Friday morning. If you tried to view live cameras or Events during that time, you likely weren’t able to. We’re very sorry for the frustration and confusion this caused.
The breach, however, occurred as Wyze was attempting to bring its cameras back online. Customers were reporting seeing mysterious images and video footage in their own Events tab. Wyze disabled access to the tab and launched its own investigation.
As it did before, Wyze is chalking up the incident to “a third-party caching client library” that was recently integrated into its system.
This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.
But it was too late to prevent an estimated 13,000 people from getting an unauthorized peek at thumbnails from a stranger’s homes. Wyze says that 1,504 people tapped to enlarge the thumbnail, and that a few of them caught a video that they were able to view. It also claims that all impacted users have been notified of the security breach, and that over 99 percent of all of its customers weren’t affected.
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Source: Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes – The Verge
Which it’s better to store stuff on your own NAS hardware instead of some vendor’s cloud.
Robin Edgar
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