Many people get a Ring camera to improve their home security. However, some are claiming that it’s left them more vulnerable than before.
While Ring cameras have proven effective in catching package thieves and revealing just how not nice a supposed “nice guy” can be, there have also been some issues reported with them—namely, fears that they can be hacked.
Now, a woman on TikTok is claiming that she’s caught someone logging into her account and looking at her Ring cameras. But is that really what happened?
A Mysterious Login
In a video with over 658,000 views, TikTok user Jeeka Turner (@jeekaturna) encourages everyone watching to “Stop what you’re doing if you have a Ring doorbell and check your app.”
“Go to the top three lines, go to ‘Control Center,’ and then go to ‘Authorized Client Devices,’” she says.
From there, one can see what devices can access their cameras. According to Turner, on her account, she saw that her Ring doorbell was added to “three to five separate devices on May 28th.”
She’s not the only one.
“I called my sister-in-law to see if hers was also hacked on May 28th, and it was,” Turner says. “So, this is the thing that’s going on nationwide.”
Turner then questions why Ring hasn’t notified customers about this before, warning those with indoor Ring cameras to be especially mindful—or even consider removing the devices completely.
“Get rid of those devices. Change your email. Change your password. Do what you have to do, but do it,” she concludes.
Can someone watch you through your Ring camera?
Turner isn’t the only one making videos about this. Searching TikTok for “Ring camera,” one can find countless videos of users warning that Ring cameras around the country had unauthorized logins on May 28th.
But if all these Ring cameras had the same problem, could it really be a hacker? Or is there something else at play here?
On July 18th, Ring posted an update to their website noting that users were currently dealing with an “issue where information is displaying inaccurately in Control Center.”
“This is the result of a backend update, and we’re working to resolve this,” the statement reads. “We have no reason to believe this is the result of unauthorized access to customer accounts.”
As noted by Snopes, to successfully carry out this widespread data breach against Ring, attackers would have had to bypass the company’s mandatory multi-factor authentication for every single affected user, either by deceiving each individual user or gaining high-level access to Ring’s central systems.
Deceiving each user would be too time-consuming to be practical—and if hackers already had high-level access in Ring’s systems, they likely wouldn’t have made their logins to people’s individual cameras visible, as they were on the Ring app.
In short, Ring’s summary of the problem appears to be accurate, as other explanations—like a mass hacking event—simply don’t make sense. Ring has already announced that they’re fixing the issue as of July 21st.
Commenters Have the Same Issue
In the comments section, many users claimed that they were experiencing a similar problem.
“This has to be a bug, how did these devices log in to all these accounts on the same date and time?” asked a user. “Ring needs to come forward and explain what’s happening here.”
“Mine was too. I had 4 on mine and removed them immediately,” added another.
“Mine was too! And we didn’t purchase the ring until this month!” exclaimed a third.
@jeekaturna Check your “Authorised client devices” NOW. #ring #fyp #hacked ♬ original sound – Jeeka
We’ve reached out to Ring via email and Turner via TikTok direct message and comment.
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