It is the stuff of nightmares.
A former ADT technician pleaded guilty on Thursday for accessing customers’ home video feeds thousands of times over four and a half years. According to a Justice Department press release, the 35-year-old Texan achieved this by simply adding himself to the accounts of approximately 200 people, allowing him to remotely watch them at will.
And yes, your motivations seem to be exactly what you would think.
“Sir. [Telesforo] Aviles noted which houses had attractive women and then repeatedly accessed these clients’ accounts to view their footage for sexual gratification, he admits, “says the press release.” engage in sexual activities within their homes. “
ADT acknowledged the incident on its website and clarified that there were 220 victims whose accounts Avilés accessed on 9,600 occasions.
“We are grateful to the Dallas FBI and the US Attorney’s Office for making Telesforo Aviles responsible for a federal crime,” wrote the ADT in a brief statement on Friday.
The horror of Avilés’ actions contrasts sharply with the ease with which he performed them. As DOJ notes, all he needed to do to gain access to cameras inside customers’ homes was to add himself to ADT Pulse accounts.
The official ADT Pulse website sells the service as offering “More views – and better control – of your smart home.”
The question now, of course, is to whom.
Ugh.
Notably, according to ADT, the company only caught Aviles in the act because a customer reported a suspicious email on his ADT Pulse account. The company went public with the news for the first time in April 2020, and all the victims appear to be in the Dallas metropolitan area.
Avilés faces up to five years in prison.
This is not the first time that people have seen their own home security cameras aimed at them. Ring cameras, an Amazon home security product, were repeatedly hacked in 2019 and Ring admitted that some of its employees tried to watch private videos from customers.
SEE TOO: Amazon wants to put a drone Ring inside your home and LOL WTF?
In other words, these things keep happening. Cameras connected to the Internet will almost certainly always be vulnerable to some sort of unscrupulous actor – be it a random hacker or, as in this case, someone from the company who installed them in your home.
It is a good, though extremely distressing, reminder that it is almost certainly better not to put your own room in a state of surveillance.
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