Ring Security Cameras
Stick-Up Camera started Live View session 'by itself'
On October 9, 2021 at about 11:45 (EDT), I went into the family room to set the alarm for the night from the keypad by the back door. Since the room lights were off, the blue 'recording' light from the Stick-up camera in that room was obvious, which alarmed me since I keep Live View and Motion Detection turned off on that camera when the alarm is in Disarmed mode. I opened the Ring app and the camera was in the middle of a Live View session, even though neither the app on my phone or my wife's phone was open and neither phone was in use at all. I immediately turned off Live View. My first thought was that somebody had hacked my account, even though both of our passwords are complicated enough that guessing the password would be unlikely. We both immediately changed our passwords. I turned Live View back on for about 30 seconds to make sure that the camera itself was working properly, which it was. It was possible that I had changed the setting to allow Live View in Disarmed mode to check the camera placement when I changed the battery several weeks ago and forgot to turn it back off, but that still wouldn't explain how Live View on the camera got turned on in the first place. Oddly, when I clicked on the previous Live View entry in the camera's timeline, which showed that it lasted about 2 minutes, I received a screen saying "Recording does not exist. Sorry, but Cloud Video Recording was not active when this event took place." Clicking on the 'Learn More' button took me to a document telling me how to schedule recordings, which was not helpful. When my wife clicked on the same event in her app, she just got a blank screen. Now, there is even no entry for that event on the camera's timeline - only the following one where I tested Live View for 30 seconds. My next thought was that the camera was triggered during a firmware update of either the camera or the alarm console, which would possibly explain the lack of a recording. However, looking at either device only shows 'Up to date' for firmware, no date and time of the last update. Is there any way to find out whether there was a firmware update going on during that time for one of my cameras or for the base alarm unit? This is the second time that I've had what I thought was an 'anomaly' with one of the cameras, and I would like to know whether a new software update might have caused those, whether the cameras are starting to malfunction after a year, or whether somebody has hacked into my cameras or WIFI network. Is there any other way that Live View could be triggered other than by somebody using the app? Personally, as a software designer and troubleshooter for over 40 years, I would think that an entry in the event log of the date and time of the last software update for each device attached to the alarm system would be expected, and wouldn't be difficult to program. (An automated text warning a day or so ahead of time is probably too much to ask.) While the vast majority of owners would never need to know that information, if there's a sudden problem, it would be nice to know whether an unseen software update might have caused it. Thanks, Ron E
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13-10-2021 04:58:05
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