When you’re dealing with live camera feeds uploaded to the cloud, strict security measures must be in place. After all, a camera is recording you inside your house and uploading to the cloud—you likely don’t want other people to look at that. Smart home company Wyze has had multiple high-profile security issues over the past few years, and now yet another one just happened, allowing some people to see the wrong video feeds.

A limited number of Wyze webcam owners experienced a concerning security breach reminiscent of a similar issue from five months ago. David Crosby, a co-founder of Wyze, confirmed to The Verge that a dozen users were inadvertently able to view thumbnails of other users’ camera feeds in their Events tab. This issue arose following an extended outage, purportedly due to AWS problems, with camera owners seeing images from other peoples’ homes.

Several Reddit posts reported receiving motion detection notifications and glimpses into unfamiliar homes. Wyze acknowledged the problem, attributing it to overload and data corruption after the AWS outage. The company clarified that only alert thumbnails were mistakenly shared and assured users that live feeds or videos were not compromised. Wyze responded promptly by taking down the Events tab, implementing additional verification measures, and forcing a reset for all app users to ensure security.

Perhaps more concerning, however, is that this is not the first time this has happened, which makes us seriously wonder how terrible data management and security practices are at Wyze. A very similar, if not the same exact, issue happened back in September. Before this, in 2022, a separate issue allowed hackers to gain access to a Wyze camera’s SD card. Something clearly needs to change urgently on Wyze’s backend—issues keep popping up, sometimes identical to previous (and supposedly solved) ones, which hints to a series of poor security practices all around. There’s no guarantee that we won’t see the same issue in a few months again, so our recommendation this time around would probably be to buy a different brand of security cameras that’s not Wyze, at least for the time being.

Source: The Verge