Hacker Gets into Family's Ring Camera, Tells Small Child They're Santa Claus

A Mississippi family is sounding the alarm after a hacker managed to infiltrate the Ring camera positioned in their little girl’s room and started talking to the child. 

“I'm Santa Claus! Don't you want to be my best friend?” he could be hearing saying to the child. “You can mess up your room. You can break your TV. You can do whatever you want.” 

Then he started playing a recording, later determined to be of Tiny Tim performing on the “Rowan and Martin's Laugh In” show in 1968.

“I was extremely alarmed; I still am,” the little girl's mother, Ashley Lemay, told Inside Edition. “Not only could they see my children, they could interact with my child. I don't know how they did it." 

The camera had been installed for a few days when the hacker started talking to Ashley's daughter, Alyssa.

John Lucich is a technology security expert and CEO of Network Security Group and explained to Inside Edition how the person might have hacked into the Ring. 

"They drive through the neighborhood looking for a WiFi unit," he said. "Once they find a WiFi unit, all they do is double click, start guessing the password and if they guess it, they are on the network and now they can connect to any device."

In a statement, a spokesperson for Ring said: "This incident is in no way related to a breach or compromise of Ring's security. We highly and openly encourage all ring users to enable two-factor authentication on their Ring account. Use strong passwords, and regularly change their passwords.”

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