It sounds like a B-movie plotline. A young couple is busy washing dishes when they hear noises coming from their child’s bedroom. They scurry into their two-year-old daughter’s bedroom only to hear a man cursing and making sexually explicit comments at their daughter, who is named Allyson. As it turns out, this event happened in real life, and it wasn’t part of a ghostly haunting written for the pictures. Instead, it turns out that a man had hacked into the Texas family’s Internet camera system in order to say unsavory things to the little girl.
Allyson’s father, Mark Gilbert, says he immediately pulled out the camera system and started doing research on where the man could have effectively gotten into his home. He later told CNN that he believes the offending man was able to hack into the camera system as well as the router in his home. This allowed the hacker to see Allyson’s wall, where she had a sign posted with her name on it. Creepily, the hacker even referred to her by name while talking to her.
"He said, 'Wake up, Allyson, you little (expletive).'"
The Gilbert family did not contact the police after the incident, but they said they would be getting rid of the system in their home, and with good reason. Hacking can happen when a person has weak security measures and especially if a device uses a weak password. Sometimes hackers can be totally harmless. Other times, they can really take someone's piece of mind by stealing private photographs. It seems like anyone who would go to the trouble to try to terrorize a family through a baby monitor needs some help. Using angry or sexually explicit language toward a two-year-old is never acceptable. In fact, it's probably a pretty good indicator of emotional problems or best case scenario, a serious lack of common sense and boundaries.
The good news is that Allyson slept through the whole incident. Her father says the little girl was born deaf and didn’t wake through the entire event.
"Allyson was born deaf, so she has cochlear implants. Thankfully, we had them off, and she didn't hear any of it and she slept right through it.”
That blessing doesn’t make the incident any less frustrating, exhausting, and terrifying, however. It may be easy to hack into the occasional toddler’s baby monitor, but I still have to wonder why that activity might seem appealing to a hacker in the first place. This little girl didn't do anything to him. She was merely minding her own business and had every right to be left alone. Hopefully, the flood of media coverage will serve as a warning to the unidentified hacker to reconsider his actions and stop invading the privacy of others.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ bikeriderlondon
