Wyze, which sells a lineup of popular and affordable self-install smart home security cameras, is doing some damage control today. It has been revealed that an online outage spawned a security issue that briefly allowed a number of Wyze camera owners to see images and video from the homes of other Wyze camera users.
In a post today on the company"s support forums (via 9to5Google) Wyze revealed the contents of several emails that were sent to the company"s customers over the weekend. The emails stated that on Friday, an issue with Wyze"s cloud system partner Amazon Web Services caused an outage on its camera on February 16 that lasted several hours.
Wyze stated that while it and AWS worked to bring its camera back online, some owners of the cameras reported to the company they were seeing the wrong thumbnails and Event Videos in the Events tabs on their apps.
Wyze stated it cut off access to the Events tab. It began an investigation and found what had happened:
The incident was caused 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 end result was that for a brief but not revealed period of time, 13,000 Wyze camera owners were seeing thumbnail videos from locations that were not their own. Also, 1,504 users tapped on those thumbnails, which could have expanded it or launched an Event video.
Wyze says it has put in a new verification method before people can see Event Videos from their cameras. It added:
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 has apologized for this security issue, stating that it "does not reflect our commitment to protect customers." It added, "We must do more and be better, and we will."