Ditch the default password to make your home camera harder to hack

Your home camera may already be listed somewhere you have never looked. Dan Michaels, the Journal's bureau chief in Brussels, says special search tools can reveal that a camera exists online, and then it is a matter of whether a hacker can pick the lock.

That lock picking has gotten faster. Michaels says artificial intelligence lets hackers search for cameras and test huge numbers of passwords, allowing them to "churn through millions or even billions of passwords."

Camera security is often poor, so many cameras are easy to hack into. Intelligence officials in the Netherlands and elsewhere have pointed to what they describe as Russian break-ins involving cameras in Western Europe, likely aimed at watching aid to Ukraine, and Michaels says camera hacking is also happening in the United States and elsewhere. Sometimes hackers want the camera view itself, and sometimes they use the camera as a gateway into other systems. A bank might be one target, he says, where hackers want financial information and a weakly protected webcam serves as the easy open door.

Michaels says to take "the same kind of steps to protect your webcams that you would take to protect any other internet-connected device," starting with passwords. Do not keep the default password that comes in the box, and change your new one every few months or once a year, in case an old password was stolen and posted to one of the password lists circulating online.

Second, buy from reputable name brands. Those makers want to protect their reputations, so they issue software updates to address potential vulnerabilities.

Third, guard your home Wi-Fi. Be careful about whom you give the network password to and whom you allow onto the network, and "avoid hooking into your home network any devices where you really have questions about the security," Michaels says.

Those three steps close the easiest openings, but they cannot make a camera fully safe.