Something Truly Terrifying Came Through This Family's Baby Monitor

An intruder terrified an Ohio family by making his way into their sleeping 10-month-old daughter's bedroom and screaming at her to wake up. And he did it all without ever setting foot in their home.

A hacker took control of the baby monitor camera in Heather and Adam Schreck’s daughter Emma’s room one night and terrorized the family for a brief few minutes, per area news outlet Fox19. The mother said she heard what sounded like a man's voice coming from the baby's room during the night, and when she checked the camera feed from her baby’s room, she noticed the camera moving on its own.

“About the time I saw it moving, I also heard a voice again start screaming at my daughter," she recalled. "He was screaming, ‘Wake up baby. Wake up baby.’ Then just screaming at her, trying to wake her up.”

Once the couple realized how serious the situation was, Adam rushed into Emma’s room. The camera promptly turned directly to him, and the mystery man on the other end started shouting expletives at him. When the father unplugged the camera, the scary invasion was over.

Last year, a family in Texas experienced a similar intrusion when a stranger hacked their baby monitor and cursed at their 2-year-old daughter.

Apparently it's relatively simple for hackers to access baby monitors that operate on a wireless Internet connection. But there are measures parents can take to try and prevent such an intrusion into their home. Wired came up with a list of three easy steps for helping make a monitoring device more secure: register the device, turn on your firewall and change the device's default login settings. (Visit Wired for a more detailed look at these easy tricks.)