Baby Monitors

Consumer products that are used to monitor babies are another category of IoT devices that are vulnerable to attacks and compromise.

Security vendor Rapid7 last year examined several network connected video baby monitors and associated cloud services from multiple vendors and uncovered 10 vulnerabilities across them.

The problems uncovered included hard-coded passwords, unencrypted communications, privilege escalation, easily guessable passwords, backdoor accounts, and flaws that would have let an attacker alter device functions.

The vulnerabilities let attackers hijack video sessions, or view video stored in the cloud, or gain complete administrative control of the baby monitor. All of the flaws were easy to exploit and would have given attackers varying degrees of remote control over compromised devices.

In announcing the vulnerabilities, Rapid7 noted how such vulnerable devices could pose a threat to any computer connected to the home network, including those used by remote workers.

An infected IoT device could “be used to pivot to other devices and traditional computers by taking advantage of the unsegmented, fully trusted nature of a typical home network,” Rapid7 had warned.

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