Two young men aged 20 and 21 were arrested in the United States last December after taking control of a dozen connected doorbells.
They orchestrated hoaxes by sending false alerts to police forces, reports
Numerama
.
The intervention was recorded thanks to the cameras placed on the devices, then broadcast on social networks.
This hoax, which consists in trapping the police, takes the name of “swatting”.
In order to strengthen the intervention of the police, the two pirates insinuated that there were emergency situations with violent parents or even hostage taking.
When the police arrived on the scene, none of this was true.
As a bonus, the two Americans were making fun of the police by insulting them via the loudspeaker.
Compromised Yahoo Accounts
To achieve their end, the hackers connected to the accounts of their victims, after obtaining the identifiers and passwords.
On the Telegram network, they insinuated that they had cracked the accounts using the "brute force" technique, that is to say by testing billions of combinations with software.
But the judge in charge of the case indicated that the culprits had used compromised Yahoo accounts.
The pirates had the daily leisure to spy on the families and could harass them.
The doorbells concerned by this hoax are of the Ring brand, the subsidiary of Amazon.
Anxious to limit the fraudulent use of its devices, the firm carried out an update last August to correct the vulnerabilities of its doorbells.
Which is of no help when the hackers have the passwords of their victim's accounts.
Company
The "swatting", this dangerous game which caused the false alarm attack in Châtelet
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hacker
Connected objects
Police
Spying