SoylentNews

RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

According to this article [securityweek.com]

A couple living in a California town near San Francisco told local media they experienced "sheer terror" over the weekend when a Nest security camera atop their family's television issued a realistic-sounding warning of missiles heading to the United States from North Korea.

Other instances of hacked Nest devices with various results have occurred recently.

Nest, which is owned by Google-parent Alphabet, told AFP that incidents of commandeered camera control in recent months were the result of hackers using passwords stolen from other online venues.

If you haven't done so recently (regardless of whether you own a Nest device) it is worthwhile to check for known compromises of your account(s). You need do nothing wrong to have your credentials exposed other than signing up on one of the thousands of internet sites that have been compromised over the years.

People can check online at sites such as http://www.haveibeenpwned.com [haveibeenpwned.com] to see whether their email addresses have been found in troves of stolen data.

Having your credentials exposed is the norm these days, and rare indeed is someone without at least one or two breaches that include their information. This is why avoiding password re-use is critical in today's online world - so that when your Blizzard account is pwned, it doesn't expose your Paypal, banking, or worse, Soylent News account.

It is a pain, but keep those passwords different somehow. Password managers [wikipedia.org] such as Keepass [keepass.info] are useful for this.

Original Submission