How exactly did the Ring camera get hacked?

[Ben321]

That was in the news like a month ago. Somebody heard somebody talking through the speaker in their Ring camera. According to the news, their camera was hacked. How exactly though? Did somebody guess their password and connect by WiFi directly to their cameras? Did their account the company that runs the Ring cloud service get compromised by somebody who managed to hack the company's servers? What exactly happened? The news didn't really go into detail on this.

[james_s]

Somebody probably left the default password on their camera or something equally trivial to guess.

I've logged into countless WiFi routers that had the default password in the past, I think people have gotten a little better about that these days but not much.

[Berni]

Yep often its a matter of using default or easy passwords.I have gotten into so many routers in the past by guessing the password.

Things are mostly getting better by the manufacturers realizing that users can't be trusted to set things up properly, so some of them have started setting randomized passwords and then printing the password on a label on the bottom of the device. Good luck tho when you visit them and ask "What's the password for your wifi", there is no way they remember that random jumble of letters or get one of those "There is a password?" or "The neighbors smart kid fixed my computers internet when it didn't work"