One of the biggest fears of users is the lack of privacy around their devices, and if we talk about surveillance cameras, things get pretty murky. Well, that is exactly what has happened with the eufy chambers, as a bug in the system has been allowing users to view other users' cameras without warning 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's just what happened to the Reddit user MeChum87, who did not hesitate to comment on the official EufyCam thread, something that aroused the attention of many other users affected by the same problem.
Apparently several users were experiencing the same issue. Wanting to check your personal cameras, received the video feed from another camera random 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 latest update of its servers, something that caused a limited number of its users (0,001% of its customer share) to see the videos of other users. . It has been confirmed that the problem affected people from United States, New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, although they have also ensured that users in Europe have not been affected.
The bug allowed users to unexpectedly log in to another user (they were 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 nobody knew exactly if they were able to see their cameras.
The official statement from the manufacturer says the following:
Due to a software bug during a server update at 10:50 a.m. (Spanish time) on May 17, a limited number of our users (0.001%) were able to access video feeds from other users' cameras. Our engineering team recognized this problem around 11:30 a.m. (Spanish time), and quickly fixed it before 12:30 p.m. (Spanish time).
The issue affected a small number of users in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Users in Europe have not been affected.
Our customer support team will continue to contact those affected. Other products such as eufy baby monitors, eufy smart locks, eufy alarm systems or eufy pet care products have not been affected.
We realize that as a security company we didn't do well enough. We are sorry to have failed in this case and are working on new protocols and security measures to ensure this does not happen again.
For any questions, users can contact the support team at: support@eufylife.com.
What is there to do?
Although the bug has been fixed, the manufacturer recommends unplugging the camera and plugging it back in, log out of the Eufy Security app and start it again 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. You just had to open the app to start watching the recordings and live feeds of a random user.
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 about 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 they could even consider use 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, since the gap was active for 1 hour and 40 minutes. The problem is that many users will have lost confidence in the brand, as some will continue to fear that this will happen again.
A security measure is to use Apple's Homekit Secure Video as a camera manager, since activating this function includes another layer of security in the control of the devices and the recorded videos are stored only in the iCloud cloud however, it is unknown if live viewing could still be affected. We will see if this event does not take its toll on Eufy.