Hot on the heels of Amazon emailing all 220 million Prime customers with a warning that their accounts are under attack, comes a claim that users of the hugely popular Ring doorbell were hacked on May 28. All of them. The claims, posted to TikTok and Reddit, have gone viral. Not least as they do, indeed, appear to show multiple unauthorised device logins all on May 28. So, has your doorbell been hacked, and if not, what the heck did happen?
The Ring Doorbell Hacking Claim That Has Gone Viral
Not so many years ago, if someone claimed that their doorbell had been hacked, then you would be looking for evidence of tinfoil hat wear. That all changed when the Internet of Things arrived, connecting just about any device you can think of in the race to be ‘smart.’ Of course, tinfoil hats and TikTok do have something of a history, so when I started getting emails from worried readers asking if the TikTok videos they had seen, warning that Ring doorbells had suffered a mass hacking attack on May 28, were true, I was tempted to dismiss it initially. The one thing that prompted me to investigate further, however, was the evidence. These videos, as well as postings to Reddit making the same claims, included the receipts in the form of screenshots showing a mass of seemingly unauthorized device connections. All dated May 28. Could an attacker, maybe with access to your account passwords, really have pulled off the hack of the century?
Of course, I then checked my own Amazon Ring doorbell account to see if this was just some elaborate hoax, and, lo and behold, there were the same myriad logins from devices all dated May 28. Something was, indeed, not right.
The difference, however, between my logs and the claims being made online, was that I recognized all the devices involved. Some couldn’t have connected on May 28, it has to be said, as I no longer owned them at that point. This did mean that a hacking event was hugely unlikely in my professional opinion. It was, I concluded, far more likely to be an update glitch behind the scenes. And Amazon has now confirmed that this was, indeed, the case. A July 18 posting from the Ring team stated: “We are aware of an issue where information is displaying inaccurately in Control Center. This is the result of a backend update, and we’re working to resolve this. We have no reason to believe this is the result of unauthorized access to customer accounts.”
