(KPRC/NBC News) A Houston, Texas couple says they were terrified when a stranger hacked their baby monitor and made vulgar threats against their infant son.
It happened Monday just before midnight when Nathan and Ellen Rigney were fast asleep downstairs, and 4-month-old Topper was asleep upstairs.
Ellen Rigney said after she heard beeping coming from the monitor next to her bed. She assumed it was a CO2 alert.
"Then we heard sexual expletives being said in his room," Rigney says. "Immediate reaction was that there's somebody in here, somebody's in my son's room! How did they get in there?!"
When Nathan and Ellen jumped out of bed and turned on the light, a Nest camera in their room, which had been off, suddenly turned on, and a man's voice ordered them to turn the light off.
"Then he said 'I'm going to kidnap your baby, I'm in your baby's room,'" Ellen Rigney recalls.
Her husband sprinted out of the room and upstairs, where Topper was safe and sound. That's when Ellen remembered reading a story online about Wi-Fi camera hacking.
"We just had to figure out how to get the Wi-Fi shut down, and shut down fast!" Ellen says. "I kept telling Nathan, 'He's not in here, somebody's hacking this!'"
They shut off the Wi-Fi and turned off the cameras and called police.
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