Ring says the ‘May 28 camera hack’ going viral on TikTok wasn’t actually a hack

Worried that hackers got access to your Ring cameras on May 28? The “May 28 Ring camera hack” videos have been all over TikTok in recent days, but Ring asserts that the hacking fears are unfounded. 

Concerns about a potential hack stemmed from a rash of alerts in the Ring app notifying users that a bunch of unknown or otherwise unexpected devices had been granted access to their Ring accounts. Strangely, the rash of alerts all happened on the same day—May 28—at roughly the same time. 

The mysterious alerts went mostly unnoticed until recently, when TikTok users caught wind of the strange Ring app notifications and began posting videos warning of a possible Ring hack. 

“Every one of my friend that has a Ring camera has this login,” says one of the many TikTok videos, with the posters telling other Ring users to check the Command Center screen of their Ring apps to see if they got the May 28 notifications, too. 

I went ahead and checked the Command Center for my own Ring account, and lo and behold, there were a bunch of May 28 alerts for new devices that had been granted access to my Ring data—although in my case, they weren’t actually new devices, but rather old phones, browsers, and other clients that I recognized from years past. My long-gone iPhone XS was among the clients in the list, as well as Safari (not entirely unexpected) and Home Assistant (an open-source smart home platform that I do, in fact, use). 

So, what’s going on here? Some Ring users on Reddit who also spotted older devices of theirs among their own May 28 alerts suspected a Ring server glitch rather than a hack, and now Ring is chiming in to say essentially the same thing. 

“We are aware of an issue where information is displaying inaccurately in Control Center,” says a notice on the Ring status webpage. “This is the result of a backend update, and we’re working to resolve this. We have no reason to believe this is the result of unauthorized access to customer accounts.” 

We’ve reached out to Ring for additional comment. 

Of course, Ring accounts can and do get hacked on a regular basis, but it usually happens because a hacker has managed to steal the victim’s Ring password.

That’s why it’s a good idea to ensure you have two-factor authentication enabled on your Ring account—and while you’re at it, you should go ahead and change your password, too. 

The TikTok trend over the May 28 Ring alerts comes roughly two months after Ring account verification emails laced with racial epithets began clogging inboxes, an event that was particularly puzzling to those who’d never owned a Ring camera or signed up for a Ring account.  

Ring began reaching out to many of those users, alerting them that someone had tried to create a Ring account using their (likely stolen) email address. 

This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.