Wyze camera security flaw let individuals view the residences of other owners

Some Wyze camera owners have complained that they were notified of events occurring inside other people’s homes and that they were unexpectedly granted access to cameras that were not theirs. Asserting the problem, Wyze cofounder David Crosby told The Verge that “some users were able to see thumbnails of cameras that were not their own in the Events tab.” After an interruption that Wyze claimed was brought on by an issue with Amazon Web Services, users began to view the camera feeds of strangers in their accounts.

Following the downtime, Crosby stated in a post on the Wyze forum that the company’s servers became overloaded, corrupting some user data. Following that incident, a security flaw appeared that let users to “view thumbnails of cameras that were not in their own Events tab. He clarified that users couldn’t see live streaming from other people’s cameras and could only see their thumbnails instead of those videos. Wyze was able to pinpoint 14 incidents prior to completely removing the Events tab.

The business announced that it has forced everyone who has recently used the Wyze app to check out to reset tokens and that it will notify all impacted users. “We will explain in more detail once we finish investigating exactly how this happened and further steps, we will take to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Crosby said.

Although the corporation hasn’t provided a thorough explanation for what transpired yet, its prompt acknowledgement of the situation marks a significant change from how it has historically handled a security flaw. The antivirus company Bitdefender said back in 2022 that it notified Wyze of a serious security flaw in the Wyze Cam v1 model in March 2019. However, the defect was unnoticed by the corporation for three years, and no remedy was released.