14 DAY TRIAL // A mother from Houston, Texas, was alerted by friends that the webcam feed from her daughters' room was being broadcasted online and available for anyone to access via an Android app.
The whole story started a few months back, when a woman from Oregon named Shelby Ivies discovered a screenshot of a girl's room on the Internet while looking for satellite images of the Earth with her kids.
Webcam feed broadcasted via Android app
Her investigation led her back to an app available on the Google Play Store called Live Camera Viewer, which allows anybody to access unsecured webcam and CCTV surveillance cameras from all over the world.
Ivies said that the image was promoted on the Play store, at the top of the page.
Quickly understanding all the consequences of having a girl's room exposed online, Ivies immediately posted the screenshot on various mothers groups on Facebook, asking for help in identifying the family from where that feed came from.
Family tracked down via Facebook
Some time later, some Houston residents recognized the room and warned the family. The mother, who wanted to be named only Jennifer, said that she felt sick at the idea of people staring at her 8-year-old daughters playing, sleeping, or dressing.
"They had [571] likes," Jennifer told ABC News about the live stream, "so I know for a fact 571 people have been staring at my kids, probably more."
Jennifer said that she suspects that her children got infected with some sort of virus while playing online with other people.
Webcam was most likely improperly configured
This explanation doesn't seem to fit the way the Android app works, and most likely, the webcam came with default settings that exposed it to external connections.
There have been many reported cases where crooks have cracked all sorts of IoT devices, VNC connections, RDP ports, webcams, routers, and DVRs just by using the device's default admin username and password combo, or by using common combinations.
The Android app is still available for download today, even if the privacy implications for such an application should have never allowed it to be listed on the Google Play Store.
