On Sunday, Nathan and Ellen Rigney were asleep downstairs in their home while their four-month-old son Topper slept upstairs when they suddenly heard beeping coming from the monitor next to their bed.
"I said, 'Hey, what is this? What's going on?'" Ellen thought after hearing the beeping sound, Click2Houston reported.
"Then we heard sexual expletives being said in his room," Ellen said. "Immediate reaction was that there's somebody in here, somebody's in my son's room! How did they get in there?!"
"Then [he] said "I'm going to kidnap your baby, I'm in your baby's room," Ellen added.
When they rushed upstairs to their child's room, they found Topper sleeping safe and sound. That's when Ellen remembered she had read an article online about strangers hacking into other people's WiFi cameras.
"We just had to figure out how to get [the WiFi] shut down, and shut down fast!" Ellen said. "I kept telling [Nathan], he's not in here; somebody's hacking this!"
They turned off their WiFi and quickly called the police.
According to Ellen, she notified home devices company Nest of the incident, but the company's staff "were no help at all" and "did not apologize."
Since then, the couple has tossed their Nest cameras and are now using a camera that doesn't connect to WiFi to keep eyes on their son.
"It's unnerving and unsettling," Ellen told NBC News. "You have something that's supposed to make you feel better, and instead it makes you feel the opposite."
In a statement to NBC News, Nest said that it has "seen instances where Nest customers have reused passwords that were previously exposed through breaches on other websites and made public."
"None of these breaches involved Nest," the company added, also noting that it encourages customers to establish "two-factor authentication" on their cameras, a security feature that sends a code to a user's email or phone number in order to confirm their identity in addition to the use of a password.
