FTC accuses Amazon Ring of nightmare IoT security fails

Until Congress passes data protection laws that result in company ending fines, no one in America is safe. How this isn’t a national security crisis is beyond me.

All this news about Hauwei but they just made something that is already easy, a little bit easier. We create our own holes everywhere, out of greed and willful neglect. We are fools to think our adversaries and competitors won’t use that against us.

The fines for this incident should be $Billions with a B, Big. End the company. Criminally prosecute company leaders and managers that ignore security, and put them in jail.

You have a responsibility and obligation, to do right by your users, customers and community. Ignoring security is inexcusable and immoral.

Creepy employees

> In January 2018, a male employee used his broad access rights to spy on a female colleague through her videos. Using her email address as a look-up mechanism, the employee identified his female co-worker’s device and watched her stored video recordings without her permission.

Weak security which they were aware of

> Ring employees wrote of the 2017-2018 attacks: “Unwittingly, we aid and abet those [hackers] who breached the data by not having any mitigations in place.” In this document, the author notes that Ring permitted “thousands of requests [for account access] per second” from a single IP address (i.e., a single user), rather than an appropriate “half dozen per day.” The author notes, “If we can slow the attacker down, they will definitely look elsewhere, as we’ve destroyed their economic model of cheap and fast bulk verification of stolen user account credentials.”

Jesus, this is much much worse than I would have cynically assumed. A part of me just feels "these people get what they deserve" (the customers i mean) but i think that's too harsh. I (we) need to do better about getting people to value privacy

Besides the points raised by the FTC, it puzzles me why people buy these things in the first place.