Just had this happen - watching tv and heard kids laughing like they were in my kitchen or living room where I have indoor cameras so I muted the tv and the kids were heard for about another 30 seconds then it stopped. It sounded like it came through a camera and not my iPhone 14 Pro Max. Is that even possible? The cameras don’t have the capability to have speaking coming out of them - right? Don’t the cameras have to go through the iPhone app to be heard?
Maybe I’m having a flashback to the 60’s and 70’s?
They do. That’s how you can do 2-way audio (sending audio through the camera using the microphone app in the view pane overlay in live view) and have your Cam v4 use the Motion Warning feature ( Settings ➜ Detection Settings ➜ Motion Warning).
Was someone else using the Wyze app to connect to your cameras and laugh/talk to you through them? That’s probably the most likely explanation.
I don’t share access to my cameras at all. My iPhone is the only one that has access to my Wyze app. I live alone and am very careful about my passwords and access to my Wyze and Internet.
It lasted maybe 40 seconds at most so I checked all my cameras for someone walking by or anything on memory cards and found nothing.
Edit: something is going on as now a Wyze plug I use to control a box fan keeps going off so I turn it back on and it turns off again after a few seconds.This plug has been running that fan for 2 years now and never had a problem.
Without a better understanding of what you experienced (capturing an incident on your phone and sharing that might be helpful if it happens again), I’m not really sure what happened.
Don’t cameras have microphones? I haven’t used the feature, but it should be possible to hear what sounds the cameras are picking up. Are your cameras outside?
Are you certain it was coming from a Wyze cam and not through an open window (either actual kids laughing or someone outside watching something on their phone etc)? Or maybe some other device in your house?
The fact that you’ve seemingly lost access to some of your devices makes it sound like someone else may have taken them over/gotten into your account. But if you have 2FA enabled that shouldn’t be the case, at least not without you realizing it since you’d get an email or text (though they could have gotten into your email too).
There was a massive breach recently where a database of hundreds of millions of logins and passwords that were collected using keylogger malware was made publicly available. It is possible someone gained access to both your Wyze and email accounts. If that turns out to be the case, you need to reset all your passwords everywhere (start with your email and cell phone accounts, and enable 2FA on both if you don’t already have it) and go from there. For those two accounts especially, a time based authentication (Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, etc) is best. Obviously if it appears you’ve been hacked, unplug your cams until you get it sorted.
Exactly the reason I removed all my indoor cameras. I put them in several rooms when my wife was working from home. She has fallen several times. One of her arms looks like the skeleton of The Terminator. Titanium rods and pins. When we both retired I pulled all indoor cameras. Since you live alone, what are you expecting to see on your indoor cameras? Do you have two factor authentication enabled?
Send an email to the @WyzeCybersecurity team at security@wyze.com if you’d like them to at least review your account security to see if they notice anything abnormal.
Typically these kinds of things are caused by audio feedback and interference. There are known cases of smart cameras having environmental sounds being misinterpreted including audio compression artifacts or distortion during procession. There could also be device-specific glitches or features. Some instances have been found to be Auditory Pareidolia. But many of those would still beg the question as to why there were sounds coming from the camera at all when there shouldn’t have been. I think the most important thing is to have Wyze security first make sure there is no intrusion from an unauthorized source. After that, you can submit logs and they can try to figure out what else was involved.
I’m certain it wasn’t kids outdoors as I haven’t opened my windows in years especially today with a 96 degree temperature with a 112 heat index. Air conditioning is the way I stay cool.
I do have 2FA and have had it since it became available. I keep a watch on all the data giveaways by all the companies that have my data and change passwords quite often letting my iPhone generate long and hard passwords. I used to use Microsoft authenticator but quit but I can’t remember why.
Most of my weird things have gone away now. The weird things happen every now and then and I usually just wait and they go away - I’m thinking Wyze network problems.
But today’s kids laughing through my camera(s) took me by surprise.
I recall when I was setting up my cameras and had the phone live streaming the video, the audio was on. I left it sitting near where the camera was for a while and it gradually started this sort of pulsating audio feedback. I can’t recall if it could have been mistaken for kids laughing as it was quite a while ago, but from what I remember it was something in that ballpark. That’s one possibility, maybe somehow one cam had the mic enabled and the other had the speaker enabled (either due to a glitch or something done while watching the feeds), or you were watching a cam with the mic on while your phone was nearby, etc? Obviously there are lots of possible explanations but feedback certainly seems to be one of them
I was laying on my bed - disabled vet and I don’t walk or sit a lot - watching tv with phone locked when I heard the laughing and giggling in the kitchen which is 14 feet away. I will try to reproduce it with what you mentioned and see.
If it was coming from a cam shouldn’t it be on memory card since I have motion and sound enabled on all my cams? I looked through them all and didn’t find anything but it would be worth double checking.
If you have a recording of that time then any cam that has sound recording enabled that was in the area should have picked it up, and it would be on the SD card (even the potential “guilty” cam itself). But if the card isn’t set to continuous recording, it would have had to be loud enough to trigger a sound event in order to record it.
The breach was actually the posting of the database where anyone and everyone could download it, the contents of it are nothing new necessarily. Nobody has quite figured out why it was exposed, but it is almost guaranteed the people who’ve been compiling it for years from malware on peoples PCs definitely did not want it exposed. So there are just thousands of new people who now have that data and can try to use it. There has been a huge uptick in people’s various accounts getting hacked since it happened.
On one hand it put a lot of people at risk, but on the other hand these people who are getting hacked at least know that unless they’ve gotten a new PC or formatted theirs recently, they could have had a keylogger/infostealer running on their PC for years, and finally know it.
The media definitely glorified it (I had to spend the day answering emails, texts, and phone calls from friends and family) but bleepingcomputer is sort of doing the opposite, making it seem like it is no big deal. I guess a good analogy would be a band is about to release a new song, they send it to the radio stations with their typical threatening verbiage that it is not to be played before x date and not to be duplicated. Obviously everyone working at those stations listens to it and gets an early treat. But someone gets ahold of it and posts it to Youtube and now the masses have all heard it before the release date. Much better to have a couple hundred people hear it early than a couple hundred thousand, if that makes sense.