Tag Archive for: ADT

Former Dallas-area ADT technician gets prison time for hacking into customers’ home security video feeds

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Sarah Freele said she hired ADT for her family’s safety and peace of mind.



A former ADT technician from the Dallas area will spend a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing customers' accounts and watching live feeds from their home security cameras that he installed.

© Ryan Michalesko/Staff Photographer
A former ADT technician from the Dallas area will spend a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing customers’ accounts and watching live feeds from their home security cameras that he installed.

But the technician who worked on her home security cameras, she said, might as well have been hiding in her bedroom closet for months, peaking through a crack in the door.

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That former ADT employee, Telesforo Aviles, was sentenced Wednesday to a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing the security cameras of Freele and more than 200 other ADT customers in North Texas.

“He was logged on to my bedroom camera five times a day,” Freele told U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr at the sentencing hearing in Dallas. “He saw it all … every intimate moment.”

Aviles, 35, faced a maximum of five years in prison for computer fraud under the terms of his plea agreement, in which he admitted to accessing customer accounts over 9,600 times since 2015.

He was cuffed and taken into custody to begin serving his sentence after the hearing.

The quiet and introverted technician, a senior supervisor with 17 years at ADT, was caught last year after the company was alerted by a customer to suspicious activity, said his lawyer, Tom Pappas. Aviles, who is married with five children, turned himself in when he was asked to, Pappas said.

“He’s mortified by what he did,” Pappas said. “He sees what he did as a betrayal of himself, too.”

Of the nearly 10,000 images Aviles accessed, about 40 were “sexual in nature” and none involved children, Pappas said.

An ADT spokesman said the company had no comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sid Mody had asked Starr to give Aviles the maximum sentence, saying that while 217 accounts were accessed, the total number of victims is much higher given that each household had multiple family members. That violation, he said, destroyed “in the worst way” their sense of feeling safe and secure at home.

“That’s going to affect them for the rest of their lives,”…

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Former Dallas area ADT technician gets prison time for hacking into customers’ home security video feeds

/in


Sarah Freele said she hired ADT for her family’s safety and peace of mind.



A former ADT technician from the Dallas area will spend a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing customers' accounts and watching live feeds from their home security cameras that he installed.

© Ryan Michalesko/Staff Photographer
A former ADT technician from the Dallas area will spend a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing customers’ accounts and watching live feeds from their home security cameras that he installed.

But the technician who worked on her home security cameras, she said, might as well have been hiding in her bedroom closet for months, peaking through a crack in the door.

Loading...

Load Error

That former ADT employee, Telesforo Aviles, was sentenced Wednesday to a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing the security cameras of Freele and more than 200 other ADT customers.

“He was logged onto my bedroom camera five times a day,” Freele told U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr at the sentencing hearing in Dallas. “He saw it all… Every intimate moment.”

Aviles, 35, faced a maximum of five years in prison for computer fraud under the terms of his plea agreement, in which he admitted to accessing customer accounts over 9,600 times since 2015.

He was cuffed and taken into custody to begin serving his sentence following the hearing.

The quiet and introverted technician, a senior supervisor with 17 years at ADT, was caught last year after the company was alerted by a customer to suspicious activity, said his lawyer, Tom Pappas. Aviles, who is married with five children, turned himself in when he was asked to, Pappas said.

“He’s mortified by what he did,” Pappas said. “He sees what he did as a betrayal of himself, too.”

Of the nearly 10,000 images Aviles accessed, about 40 were “sexual in nature” and none involved children, Pappas said.

An ADT spokesman said the company had no comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sid Mody had asked Starr to give Aviles the maximum sentence, saying that while 217 accounts were accessed, the total number of victims is much higher given that each household had multiple family members. That violation, he said, destroyed “in the worst way” their sense of feeling safe and secure at home.

“That’s going to affect them for the rest of their lives,” Mody told the…

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Cyber Security Today – More ransomware gangs now using DDoS attacks, more data thefts and an ADT technician admits spying on women

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More ransomware gangs now using DDoS attacks, more data thefts and an ADT technician admits spying on women

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Monday January 25th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. To hear the podcast click on the arrow below:

There’s a new ransomware tactic going around: Launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites, then demanding organizations pay up to get decryption keys for scrambled data or the attack will continue. Denial of service attacks are like someone knocking on a door for hours. The door is a website. Too many knocks and the website crashes, and the organization has trouble doing business. Last fall the Bleeping Computer news service said two ransomware gangs started using this strategy. Now, it says, a third gang is doing it.

Organizations used to ignore ransomware attacks by restoring data from backups. Then gangs began stealing data in addition to encrypting it, as extra leverage: Pay for decryption keys to unscramble the data or you’ll be embarrassed by the release of the stolen data. The distributed denial of service attack is a variation of this threat.

Organizations should consider adding denial of service defences to their cybersecurity strategies. Typically these services blunt denial of service attacks by spreading the huge wave of knocks across the Internet.

Separately a security firm called Radware warned last week that other gangs continue to launch denial of service extortion attacks against websites and demand bitcoin to stop. These gangs don’t use ransomware. Their weapon is the denial of service attack alone.

Where do denial of service attacks come from? They come from huge numbers of internet-connected devices like computers that are unknowingly infected and chained together into a botnet that a crook can weaponize. Then the power of thousands or tens of thousands of devices are fired at a web site. Those devices usually get infected because they haven’t got the latest security updates installed, or they haven’t been configured right. Last week a security vendor called Netscout warned that Windows computers that haven’t properly secured their…

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ADT technician hacked home security cameras to spy on naked women

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Most people are aware that using smart devices or internet-connected tech can open you up to privacy issues. After all, we’ve all seen news stories about spying or peeping due to smart device hacking.

Many of these stories are about outside cybercriminals taking advantage of loopholes in the system to gain access to security footage or other personal information. Not many involve security issues caused by employees of smart tech companies. Tap or click here to see why five smart video doorbells recently failed security tests.

However, one recent and scary issue with hacking does involve an employee of a security company. In this case, the employee was using customers’ security cameras to spy on women. Here’s what happened and who was targeted in the hack.

Here’s the backstory

Earlier this week, Telesforo Aviles, a 35-year-old former technician for security company ADT, admitted to federal prosecutors that he accessed more than 200 ADT customer camera feeds to spy on them. Aviles said he targeted particularly attractive women to watch them at home as they undressed, slept or had sex.

According to the guilty plea submitted by Aviles in court, the ADT tech not only spied on the women but secretly accessed the customers’ accounts more than 9,600 times during a four year period.

While working for ADT, Aviles would determine which women to target and note where they lived. He would then add his personal email address to their ADT Pulse accounts to access their video feeds. In some cases, Aviles would tell the women that he needed to temporarily add himself to their accounts to test their security system. In other cases, he would do so without notifying the customer.

Adding his email address to the women’s accounts allowed Aviles to watch the customers’ security camera feeds undetected through the ADT Pulse app. Aviles was eventually caught, but not before accessing over 200 Texas-based video feeds nearly 10,000 times.

ADT first alerted customers to the incident in April 2020 on its website.

Federal charges were brought…

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