Ring, the smart security system manufacturer owned by Amazon, has once again been sued for not keeping its customers’ safe, per a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.
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The families that filed the lawsuit claim their home security cameras were hacked, leading to intimidations, threats and extortion. The lawsuit highlights that Ring “promises users that it takes security seriously and will safeguard users’ private information. But instead of helping families protect their homes, Ring security devices have had the opposite effect by permitting hackers to exploit security vulnerabilities in the Ring system to spy on and harass Ring customers inside their own homes.”
Ashley LeMay and Dylan Blakeley take the legal action against the Amazon-owned company just weeks after they bought two Ring cameras for their home. LeMay used them to check on their four daughters while she worked overnight at a hospital, especially their middle daughter that suffers from seizures.
The lawsuit details the first hack experience they had on December 4, 2019. “Shortly after 8 p.m., both of the Ring cameras installed in the Blakeleys’ home began live-streaming, and the Tiny Tim cover of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” a song that appeared in a scene from the 2020 horror film “Insidious,” began to play through the two-way talk feature,” the filing states. One of the daughters (only eight years old) went into the bedroom where the camera was to look for the source of the music. The music stopped and a voice started talking to her, shouting racial slurs. The child went to get her father, who went into the room and disabled the device, per the filing.
Todd Craig, and Tania Amador were home a voice shouted “Ring support! Ring support!” from the Ring camera, per the file. Amador was napping and Craig was standing in front of the camera. The lawsuit continues, “The hacker then accessed the couple ’s doorbell camera and told them, ‘I’m outside your front door.’ The voice also threatened the couple with ‘termination’ if they did not pay a ransom of 50 bitcoin.”
The potential class action lawsuit is emphasized in the lawsuit, as plaintiffs detail other cases of hacking across the US. It also alleges negligence, “Ring does not require users to implement two-factor authentication. It does not double-check whether someone logging in from an unknown IP address is the legitimate user. It does not offer users a way to view how many users are logged in. It offers no protection from brute-force entries—mechanisms by which hackers can try an endless loop of combinations of letters and numbers until they land on the correct password to unlock account. Even though these basic precautions are common and unexceptional security measures across a wealth of online services, Ring does not utilize them for its services.”
The plaintiffs are demanding a trial by jury on all counts where a jury trial is permitted.
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Reference: Geekwire
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