Despite the increased number of reported hacks, Ring customers are standing by the devices.
- Amazon Ring home-security cameras let people easily monitor their front porch and home interior using an app. But the unique security features come with their own set of threats.
- One man's camera was hacked, and the culprit demanded a bitcoin payment and threatened to "terminate" him.
- According to a Business Insider survey of hundreds of Ring users, despite the threats, customers aren't willing to let go of the technology, and the company just keeps growing.
- One woman even credits Ring with saving her family from a fire.
- Police are big fans of Ring, with more than 500 police departments in the US partnering with the company to access users' videos.
- Ring is taking steps to beef up security.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
At first, Todd Craig thought he was being pranked.
Craig was standing in front of his Amazon Ring indoor camera on December 9 when he heard a stranger's voice coming over the speakers laughing and barking, "Ring support! Ring support!"
Craig, an IT worker who lives in Texas, jumped and assumed his girlfriend, Tania Amador, was playing a joke on him. He and Amador previously used an ADT home-security system but recently switched to Ring when they realized they could go from paying about $100 per month to Ring's $100 per year.
Amador wasn't pranking him - she was asleep upstairs. At that point, he realized the breach was real.
Craig hid behind a pillar in his kitchen, determined to stay outside the view of the indoor camera. He ultimately rushed behind the device and pulled out the batteries - only to hear a voice coming from his Ring doorbell camera mounted on the front of his house.
"I'm outside your front door," the voice said. "Pay this 50 bitcoin ransom, or you will get terminated yourself."
The couple are among many who say their Ring cameras were broken into by hackers in recent months. A Georgia woman was harassed by a Ring hacker while lying in bed. A hacker broke into a Ring in Virginia to taunt a 6-year-old. Households in Michigan, California, Kansas, Connecticut, Florida, New York, and Texas reported similar digital break-ins.
Craig and Amador are now plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Ring. They allege the company hasn't done enough to protect users from hacks. A Tennessee family, which is also part of the suit, said it was targeted by a hacker who used its Ring cameras to spy on and harass an 8-year-old girl. The family said the hacker shouted: "I'm your best friend. I'm Santa Claus. Don't you want to be my best friend? ... Mess up your room; break your TV."
Business Insider surveyed hundreds of Ring users about their reasons for purchasing the security camera, their reaction to news of hacks, and what the technology means to them.
Many said they used Ring doorbells but refused to put cameras inside their homes because of the threat of hacks. But while the majority of surveyed users expressed concern, they said Ring's safety features felt worth the trade-offs. To them, the technology had already become indispensable.
'Peace of mind'
Gladys Castaneda was fast asleep in her Mesa, Arizona, home when her Ring doorbell woke her. It was 5 a.m., and the video feed from her doorbell camera showed a man pounding on her door (she later learned the man was a neighbor she hadn't met before).
Castaneda, who was alone with her 1-year-old and 2-year-old daughters, would have been wary about going downstairs at such an hour, but she used the Ring camera to speak to her neighbor directly. There was a fire next door, he said, and the flames were about to reach her house.
Courtesy of Gladys Castaneda
Gladys Castaneda, pictured with her husband and two daughters, credits Ring with saving her family from a fire.
"I don't know if I would have known to answer the door unless I had the Ring. I thought somebody was trying to break in," Castaneda told Business Insider.
After hearing about the fire, she sprang into action.
"So I run, give him my first daughter to hold, run back inside, and get my second daughter. Having the front-porch video gave me peace of mind because I didn't know who I was giving my girls to." Casteneda said she was unphased by reports of Ring hacking; her only complaint is that the doorbell's battery runs out too quickly.
She's not alone in her praise of the controversial security system.
The company, which was founded in 2013 and purchased by Amazon five years later, has "millions" of users, according to a spokesperson. Even as news of Ring hacks swirled, Ring's online sales in the US continued to rise. According to data-analytics firm Jumpshot, sales in December grew 180% compared with the year prior, with nearly 400,000 cameras sold that month.
Police partnerships
One big fan of Ring? The police.
The number of police departments across the US partnered with the company has risen from 400 in August to more than 500. Municipalities are even spending taxpayer money to convince more people to buy Ring cameras, with some cities committing up to $100,000.
Through Ring partnerships, police departments can submit requests for videos from people's cameras within a specific time frame, which homeowners can decline. Beginning in February, users will be able to preemptively opt out of receiving requests from police. However, as with any security footage, police can pursue a search warrant to seize video even after a user has declined to share it.
Many customers surveyed by Business Insider said they were unaware that police departments partnered with Ring could access security footage from their homes.
Jamie Siminoff, the founder and CEO of Ring, defended Ring's partnerships with police in a January 7 interview with Business Insider, saying they give both law enforcement and customers "more privacy, more security, and more control."
But privacy and civil-liberties activists have slammed Ring for giving police a new tool to expand surveillance and track people's movements.
"The white suburban homeowners who buy these devices are not particularly likely to switch off notifications from police," Evan Greer, the deputy director of the nonprofit group Fight for the Future, said of police video requests. "What about all of the people that walked by that camera, the mail carrier that has to walk up to that camera every day, the teenagers in the park across the street ... who don't have a choice about whether their neighbor puts one of these cameras up?"
The next big hack
According to Ring, the series of hacks that have hit Ring owners in the past two months were not the result of a system flaw but rather occurred because users reused passwords from other services, which may have been stolen in a breach.
But cybersecurity experts told Business Insider the company could do more to protect users against hacks.
"If you get hacked, they would know everything about you," Brian Vecci, the field chief technology officer at the data-security firm Varonis, said. "They would know exactly what rooms you're in. They would know every member of your family and when they come and go. You start putting multiple types of data together, and you can start telling this interesting and powerful, and potentially really damaging story about a person."
When Motherboard tested Ring's security features in December by attempting to log in to the device using incorrect credentials from unknown IP address, it didn't trigger any warning to the device's owner, the outlet said.
Ring has begun to take small steps to beef up security. This month, the company is rolling out a privacy dashboard that will let people see who's logged in to their devices. It will also begin requiring that customers use two-factor authentication, a safeguard against stolen passwords, and notifying users when someone logs in to their accounts from an unfamiliar IP address.
"Seeing that video of that girl made me cry. And every time I think about it, it makes me sad," Siminoff told CNET of the "Santa Claus" hacker who taunted the 8-year-old girl.
Even then, Siminoff said Ring's security was not at fault, telling Business Insider the next day that "it's hard to say that you could have done better."
Vecci said the uptick in reported security hacking since December didn't mean the problem was a new one.
"It's just that nobody was really noticing," he said.
"I would argue that Ring has a bit of a responsibility," Vecci added. "This has been an issue in cybersecurity forever: It's convenience versus security. Someone somewhere is saying, 'If we make it even a little bit harder to use, people aren't going to use it.'"