A million baby monitors and security cameras were easily viewable by hackers

A baby’s eyes peer directly into the camera lens. A kid with a striped shirt looks up, then away. A boy in a policeman’s costume, a gold star on his chest. A messy bedroom that reminds me of my own daughters, with an unmade bunk bed, a little girl’s hat and headband, and Hello Kitty plastered on the wall.

One thought repeats in my mind: I shouldn’t be seeing this. No stranger should.

But bad actors could’ve easily spied on all these locations — and a million more — because many of Meari Technology’s Wi-Fi baby monitors and security cameras were absurdly insecure. If you had access to one of those cameras, you theoretically had access to them all.

Meari is a Chinese white-label brand whose cameras ship under hundreds of different names. Many are generic-sounding Amazon sellers like Arenti, Anran, Boifun, and ieGeek. But financial records show one of the company’s biggest customers is Wyze; its biggest customer is Zhiyun; and many hackable cameras were from Intelbras. At least one of Petcube’s pet-monitoring cameras appears to be a Meari product as well. That doesn’t mean cameras from every brand were affected, but a million were.

Sammy Azdoufal — the man from France who created a remote-controlled army of DJI Romo robot vacuum cleaners without really trying — tells The Verge he found 1.1 million remotely accessible Meari cameras almost the same way.