One of the biggest fears of users is the lack of privacy around their devices, and if we talk about surveillance cameras, things get quite murky. Well that is exactly what has happened with the Eufy cameras , since a bug in the system has been allowing users to see the cameras of other users without prior notice and completely by surprise.
Looking at the neighbor
Imagine that you are calm at home and you decide to see what is happening in the children’s room, you open the application and … you begin to see the image of the interior of a house located in Australia. Where are my children? You will ask yourself. That is just what happened to Reddit user MeChum87, who did not hesitate to comment on the official EufyCam thread, something that attracted the attention of many other users affected by the same problem.
Apparently multiple users were experiencing the same problem. Wanting to check their personal cameras, they were getting the video feed from another random camera from an unknown corner of the world. Imagine that they had been watching you without knowing it.
Apparently, most of those affected were located in New Zealand and Australia, but later the company itself has confirmed more areas globally.
What has happened?
Eufy made a confirmed statement that everything had been due to a software error caused by the last update of its servers, something that caused a limited number of its users (0.001% of its client share) to see the videos of other users . It has been confirmed that the problem affected people from the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina , although they have also assured that users in Europe have not been affected.
The error allowed users to log in to another user unexpectedly (they were currently logged in), so they had to log out and log back in with their account to get everything back to normal. The problem was also that no one knew exactly if they were being able to see their cameras.
What is there to do?
Although the error has been corrected, the manufacturer recommends unplugging the camera and reconnecting it, logging out of the Eufy Security application and restarting it so that everything works correctly.
Am I affected? What I can do?
As the company has confirmed, customers in Europe have not been affected, but if you are in Mexico and Argentina, you could have suffered the problems of this very serious error. The error in question practically translated as a login with another user’s account. All you had to do was open the app to start watching a random user’s recordings and live feeds.
Unfortunately there is no way to know if they have been watching us without knowing it, so it is best not to think too much and forget it completely. One of the options that many users are considering is to disconnect the cameras forever, since they do not trust the security they offer, and could even consider using an Echo Show as a surveillance camera if the situation requires it.
Is it safe to continue using Eufy’s cameras?
The manufacturer has confirmed that the error was quickly corrected, as the gap was active for 1 hour and 40 minutes. The problem is that many users will have lost quite a lot of trust in the brand, as some will continue to fear that this will happen again.
One security measure is to use Apple‘s Homekit Secure Video as the camera manager, since activating this function includes an additional layer of security in the control of the devices and the recorded videos are stored only in the iCloud cloud. however, it is unknown whether live view could continue to be affected. We will see if this event does not take its toll on Eufy.
