-By Warner Todd Huston
A Houston, Texas couple with a disabled child was shocked when an Internet hacker got into their Internet-supported baby monitor video camera and began to say nasty things to the child over the loudspeaker in the device.
Marc Gilbert and his wife were sent scrambling to disconnect the camera when the hacker began to tell their child, Allyson, “Wake up, you little s**t,” and went on to yell out sexually explicit things over the device in the girl’s bedroom.
“As a father, I’m supposed to protect her against people like this. So it’s a little embarrassing to say the least but it’s not going to happen again,” Gilbert told KTRK TV in Houston.
The Gilberts’ daughter, Allyson, was born with a severe hearing problem and uses a cochlear implant–the device made famous when Rush Limbaugh underwent an implantation operation.
“Thankfully we had them off and she didn’t hear any of it and she slept right through it,” Gilbert said in an interview.
The Gilberts want to warn other parents that this could happen. One major worry is that the images of kids innocently living their lives in their bedrooms can be captured by hackers using the Internet-based monitors then selling the images to kiddie porn rings.
Anyone using any Internet device, especially wifi devices, should be sure to change the default passwords that the devices come with. Users should also make sure to change passwords every few months and make sure they are not easy to guess. Don’t use family names or anniversary dates, don’t use sequential numbers like 1-2-3-4, and certainly don’t use “password” for your password.
For his part, Marc Gilbert has decided not to use such a device ever again.
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–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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