Wyze cameras reportedly let owners see into a stranger’s home — again

Wyze cameras reportedly let owners see into a stranger’s home — again

Image: Wyze

Five months ago, we wrote about how your Wyze webcam might have let strangers peek into your house. It appears to have happened again.

After an extended outage that Wyze linked to problems with AWS, ten different Redditors are reporting that their Wyze app showed them images from a security camera that wasn’t their own — giving them glimpses of a stranger’s porch or living room. Some of the videos were from entirely different timezones.

“One of my cameras notified me of an event from inside someone else home with them in it walking around,” begins one post. “I just got a motion detection notification with a picture for someone else’s house that isn’t mine!” reads another.

“Why did I get someone else’s notification which showed their living room? 2nd time in a few months. This is bad,” read a third.

A fourth wrote, in all caps:

LOOKING THROUGH MY EVENTS AND ITS NOT MY HOUSE. A LADY IS WALKING AROUND IN A LIVING ROOM. THIS IS ON MY ACCOUNT. HUGE SECURITY ISSUE. I SHOULDN’T BE SEEING INSIDE SOMEONE ELSES HOME. ANOTHER EVENT SHOWS SOMEONE ELSES PROPERTY WHICH SEEMS TO BE A BACKYARD.

“I’m able to see a random camera I do not have permission for,” reads a similar post in the Wyze forums. “Notification alert for a camera I don’t own,” a second one starts. Six users commented on other peoples’ Reddit posts to say they, too, were seeing these videos.

On Wyze’s Facebook page, there was another comment reporting the same thing. According to one woman, “Are you also aware that you probably have a major security issue during your current ones! I had an “event” where a lady was walking around her living room! And another where I could see the overview of someone’s back yard!”

Earlier today, Wyze experienced a huge outage of some sort. But even after cameras came back online, it apparently discovered a new security issue with the Events tab — the same place where most of these users say they saw a stranger’s images appear.

“We are still investigating an issue with the Events Tab and will have another update shortly with further info,” the company reported at 1:07PM ET.

At 2:27PM ET, the company turned off the Events tab entirely: “We are temporarily disabling the Event tab in the Wyze app to investigate a possible security issue and will have it back up soon,” it wrote in a service advisory. The company made no mention of what the issue might be.

We contacted Wyze two hours ago at multiple email addresses but haven’t heard back.

Two years ago, I told you how Wyze swept a security vulnerability under the rug for three years, never notifying its customers that their unpatchable v1 cameras could have theoretically let hackers access video feeds over the internet, or that patches were required for later cameras to prevent the same thing.

Last September, The New York Times publicly stopped recommending Wyze cameras following our reporting, noting that Wyze never reached out to its customers or “provided meaningful details about the incident.”