Arabella Asis Tech 02.19.2024 20:Feb PM EST

Wyze Confirms Camera Breach Among 13,000 Customers

Wyze reported that the latest camera breach affected 13,000 customers, far from the initial company report that claimed only 14 people were impacted.

The camera breach caused customers to briefly see a stranger's property since Wyze showed an image from someone else's camera.

(Photo : Wyze)

Wyze Apologizes to Customers After Camera Breach Incident

Wyze confirmed the total number of affected customers upon sending an email to customers the letter entitled "An Important Security Message from Wyze." The company then detailed some information about the breach and apologized to its customers.

In addition, the company also hinted some blame on its web hosting provider AWS. "The outage originated from our partner AWS and took down Wyze devices for several hours early Friday morning. If you tried to view live cameras or Events during that time, you likely weren't able to," the company wrote.

However, the breach was detected to have occurred while Wyze was trying to bring its cameras back online. Several customers have then reported seeing unfamiliar images and video footage in their own Events tab.

Wyze Blames Third-Party Caching Client Library

After several reports of the incident, Wyze disabled the access to the tab and started an investigation. The company pinpointed a "third-party caching client library" that was recently added to the system.

According to Wyze, the new client library was overwhelmed with increased demand. It eventually mixed up the device ID and user ID mapping, leading to the connection of data to incorrect accounts.

Wyze reported that 1,504 people tapped to enlarge the thumbnail of an unfamiliar footage, some of them even caught the video that they were able to view. As a result, some customers were threatening to delete their accounts.

Meanwhile, Wyze is still trying to fix the privacy concerns of the customers by promising to add another layer of verification.

"We have also modified our system to bypass caching for checks on user-device relationships until we identify new client libraries that are thoroughly stress tested for extreme events like we experienced on Friday," the company announced.