Horrified mum hears chilling man’s voice on hacked baby monitor saying her child is ‘a cute one’
A HORRIFIED mum has described hearing a man's voice saying her six-month-old son was a "cute one" over a hacked baby monitor.
Kiara, from Melbourne, Australia, said she was woken up by the voice shortly after putting baby Zivko to bed one night.
The mum-of-three had been using the monitor to watch Zivko, who was born prematurely, since he began sleeping in his own room only weeks earlier.
“My partner Daniel and I were sleeping, everything was quiet and dark,” she told .
“Then I heard it, a really deep man’s voice that doesn’t belong to anyone that I know.
"I heard him say, ‘Mmm … that’s a cute one.’
"I was frozen. I was so scared. I reached over to my partner and squeezed his arm so he would wake up.”
Kiara's partner, Daniel, began checking all the rooms in the house, but Kiara was convinced the sound had come from her phone, which was on her bedside table and connected to the monitor through the wi-fi.
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The couple immediately unplugged the monitor and Kiara uninstalled the app from her phone.
“I didn’t want to think about all the disgusting things that they were thinking of looking at my baby,” she said.
Kiara said she spent a long time looking into different models before purchasing the monitor, made by Mirabella, from retailer Kmart.
She and Daniel had even taken steps to make sure the network was secure, setting new passwords for the monitor and app instead of using the default ones and setting a strong password for her wi-fi.
“I had heard of this stuff happening, but only in the movies," she said.
"I thought it would never happen to me, that’s why I was so shocked.”
After the incident in the early hours of October 29 last year, Kiara also recalled having previously heard other strange creaking noises coming from the camera late at night.
She said that, at the time, she thought the camera was simply shaking because it hadn't been mounted on Zivko's cot securely enough and even tried attaching it to an adjacent wall, but the noises continued.
'THIS ONLY HAPPENS IN THE MOVIES'
Kiara took the monitor back to Kmart and told the store about the incident.
She said that if she does buy another one, it will probably only be a voice monitor, and that the experience has put her off using a camera altogether.
In a statement, Mirabella told Kidspot that the monitors are produced to “international standards for a global market”.
“The product has had excellent reviews, and to the best of its knowledge, the baby monitor is a secure device," it said.
It said that every device comes with a unique security key, inaccessible to others, and that the company is "unaware of any other hacking incident or vulnerability for its devices."
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Parents have previously spoken out about having similar experiences with other models of baby monitor.
The government's National Cyber Security Centre has also urged parents to change the default passwords on their devices to guard against cyber criminals.
