A Houston mother of two daughters came face to face with what she called her biggest fear when she realised some hackers had tapped into her daughter’s bedroom.
The perpetrators had been broadcasting live streams of all the activity in the bedroom, giving access to thousands of people to the private lives of the girls.
“We installed cameras for their protection, “ Jennipher said. “ I feel like a failure. I can’t believe strangers have been observing my kids all this time.” Jennifer has three kids in total and asked to leave her last name anonymous.
She said in an interview that she learned about the hack when she was contacted by a friend who told her that she saw a picture of her kids’ room posted online.
The image was posted on a mother’s group on facebook as someone tried to locate and warn the parents of the kids.
The Poster was Shelby Ivies who is also a mother living about 2000 miles from Oregon.
“I was crying as I thought about how violated the mother must feel,” Ivies said.
Ivies, who has two kids in Keizer, Oregon said that she was browsing through satellite images of the earth with her son. She then went on to check for any more satellite streams she could find and ended up downloading an app called Live camera.
Ivies opened the app and scrolled around until she finally found a stream of a room in Houston belonging to a young girl. The location was indicated on the page at the top.
She then captured the image and posted it on facebook, sharing it on news pages and groups. The image was shared a total of 4000 +times.
Jennifer then contacted Ivies to locate the stream. The Stream had been ongoing from the 27th of July.
It all happened when one of Jennifer’s daughter was trying to play a computer game with some friends online.
She was required to select a server but didn’t know what her family’s server was so she did an online search and used one unprotected server.
“There are lots of unprotected servers and kids are unwittingly opening doors to strangers by using these,” Jenifer said.
The feed accumulated a total; of 571 likes, meaning my kids were watched by at least 571 pople,” Jennifer said.
She is no longer allowing her kids online in the meantime as she doesn’t want to take any chances.
Ivis and Jennifer have since become friends. Jennifer says Ivies has sort of protected them and saved their lives in some way.
