Hannah Hopkins 
Feb 20, 2024
Wyze, a Seattle-based company, has garnered immense popularity by offering reasonably priced smart security cameras and a huge array of smart home gadgets, securing an unmatched reputation on the market.
However, the company has recently been hit by a security breach a couple of days back, which the industry experts say is to test customers's trust in the company. The breach involves around 13,000 Wyze customers receiving images and video from Wyze cameras installed in strangers' homes.
As reported by Digital Trends, this malfunction is probably linked to an outage that engulfed Wyze cameras at the end of last week. Wyze, attributed the digital outbreak to its services having some issues with cloud company Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, the company did not disclose details of the matter.
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After the outage, when Wyze was working to restore its service, customers began to notice that they were seeing images from other people's cameras. After finding the issue, Wyze sent an email to its customers on Monday, informing them that approximately 13,000 accounts had received thumbnail images from Wyze cameras owned by other customers.
“We can now confirm that as cameras were coming back online, about 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnails from cameras that were not their own and 1,504 users tapped on them. Most taps enlarged the thumbnail, but in some cases an Event Video was able to be viewed,” Wyze said in an email to The Verge.
The company further explained in its email that the incident was triggered by “a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system. This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.”
The company stated that over 99.75% of Wyze accounts were unaffected by the security incident. It also mentioned in its communication that it has implemented additional verification measures to prevent future breaches, particularly for accessing Event Videos.
Wyze has experienced similar challenges in the past, including a previous incident resembling the recent one. However, the company emphasised in its message to customers that security is a “top priority” for the company, adding: “We are so sorry for this incident and are dedicated to rebuilding your trust.”.
