A bug in Wyze security cameras allows users to watch other people's videos

Ángel Jiménez from Luis USA

USA

Updated Monday, February 19, 2024-23:37

Last week, after several hours without being able to access the videos from their surveillance cameras due to a failure in the company's servers, thousands of Wyze users began to see strange images in their apps and websites.

Instead of the miniatures of their homes and businesses, other bedrooms

or living rooms, other kitchens or gardens appeared.

In thousands of cases, when clicking on those thumbnails,

the app even showed the live video of those rooms,

belonging to other clients of the company, a monumental security failure that has forced the company, which has millions of clients all over the world, to apologize.

At first, the company blamed the problem on

Amazon

, explaining that restarting one of the AW3 infrastructure servers caused a configuration error in its databases.

David Crosby,

co-founder of the company, also minimized the number of affected users, stating that there had been just over a dozen.

But a little later, in an email addressed to all its customers, Wyze acknowledged that the fault was a new library implemented on its servers that had been developed by third parties.

Almost 13,000 users had access to other users' video signals for several minutes.

More than 1,500 accounts clicked on the thumbnails of their applications or their website to see these videos from other users in larger sizes, according to the company.

In the apology email sent to customers, Wyze explains that 99.77% of the company's user accounts were not affected by the security breach, but the event has

set off alarms for many customers

, who They have been complaining for days on forums like Reddit or X and that they are considering starting a class action lawsuit.

Wyze, for now, has confirmed that it is going to change some of the functions of its app so that there are

more security checks

before being able to access video thumbnails and the live signal from now on.

Perhaps the most serious thing is that it is not the first time it has happened. Last September, Wyze users suffered

a similar problem.

An error in the cache memory of the company's servers caused some users, when accessing their cameras, to see the videos recorded by those of 10 different users. "For about 40 minutes, up to 2,300 users who logged into the web viewing portal and could not have seen the camera feed of one of these 10 affected users," the company explained then.