I no longer trust Eufy

Recently, Eufy’s entire network fell victim to a major security breach that basically gave hackers full control to most Eufy cameras out there.

I have a few questions…

  1. Are Eufy cameras with HomeKit Secure Video not affected?
  2. Is it worth switching to an alternative like I did with Roku?
  3. Is it even worth trusting Anker/Eufy with their products anymore?

If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read up on what happened to Eufy. Regardless, thanks for the help! :smile:

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As I read it, the problem was a software bug, not hackers.

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I’m not that concerned that someone might have seen my front yard for a few hours in the middle of the night.

Cameras solely on Homekit should not be affected by this.
Some Eufy indoor cams might if they need the Eufy app to link to homekit.

Depends on whether you trust the alternative vendor.
I like the fact Anker makes decent homekit cams, not many other vendors do.

Depends on whether you believe the “bug” explanation.

I myself do not particularly trust or distrust Anker.
They’ve delivered solid products for years and one issue in itself would not change my mind about that.
(even though the issue is quite big)

You could take the position that since Anker is a Chinese company it should not be trusted in the first place, but I’d not go that far yet.

What would cause me to lean more towards distrust would be if they indeed were compromised and deliberately spun it to be the consequence of a bug. That would mean transparency is not in their vocabulary and that’s not something you’d want for a company that runs your home camera systems.

From news reports I’ve seen its a botched server upgrade or a software bug that has caused this issue, but I’ll wait a few more days to see what the final response is.

It would make more sense to abandon Eufy if you had a reason to believe another vendor was inherently more secure, but I’m not sure that’s in evidence.

This kind of reminds me of people who swear they’re never flying _______ airline again due to some problems. If you do that, and you fly with any amount of frequency, in the span of about two years the odds are good you’ll run out of airlines to choose from as they’re all pretty bad.

And if “getting hacked” is an exclusionary criteria for a vendor, you’ll want to cancel all of your credit cards. And not shop online, pretty much ever again.

I agree with @JKoopmans that the biggest question is whether they’re forthright about things. It’s one thing to have a (very, very) bad day with a botched upgrade. It’s another thing entirely to intentionally build a security hole into a system (i.e. “the government asked us to install this back door”. And it’s yet another thing to have either of those problems, and outright lie about it.

I never trusted them anyway…they are a Chinese company…

However I turn that bit off and just opt for local storage

Everything (for the most part) is made in China. Do you have a problem with Chinese people?

I think that’s a pretty huge leap, assumption-wise.

Most people I know don’t have any issues with Chinese people, but the actions of the Chinese government can be concerning on a number of fronts - particularly privacy and security.

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Okay, that’s fair game. From past experience, such a discussion usually doesn’t end well though.