Vulnerabilities Identified in Wyze Cam IoT Device

At Bitdefender, we care deeply about security, so we’ve been working with media partners and IoT devices manufacturers to identify vulnerabilities in the world’s best-selling connected devices. As a leading vendor of cybersecurity protection across endpoint and IoT devices, we have been assessing the security of smart-home equipment for more than half a decade. Our goal is to help vendors and customers stay on top of security and privacy blind spots and make the IoT ecosystem safer for everybody.

While looking into the Wyze Cam device, we identified several vulnerabilities that let an outside attacker access the camera feed or execute malicious code to further compromise the device.

Vulnerabilities at a glance

• Authentication bypass (CVE-2019-9564)
• Remote control execution flaw caused by a stack-based buffer overflow (CVE-2019-12266)
• Unauthenticated access to contents of the SD card

Download the research paper here

Mitigation

Home users should keep a close eye on IoT devices and isolate them as much as possible from the local or guest network. This can be done by setting up a dedicated SSID exclusively for IoT devices, or by moving them to the guest network if the router does not support the creation of additional SSIDs.

Additionally, IoT users can use the free Bitdefender Smart Home Scanner app to scan for connected devices, identify and highlight vulnerable ones. IoT device owners should also make sure that they check for newer firmware and update devices as soon as the vendor releases new versions.

To minimize risks of compromise, smart home users should consider the adoption of a network cybersecurity solution integrated into the router, such as the NETGEAR Orbi or Nighthawk routers powered by Bitdefender Armor.

IMPORTANT: The analyzed device comes in several versions: Wyze Cam version 1, Wyze Cam Black version 2, as well as Wyze Cam version 3. We learned that, while versions 2 and 3 have been patched against these vulnerabilities, version 1 has been discontinued and is no longer receiving security fixes. Customers who keep using Wyze Cam version 1 are no longer protected and risk having their devices exploited.