Eufy Security Flaw with cameras and doorbells - footage deleted by pushing reset button

Soldato
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10 Jul 2008
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Has anyone seen the discussion on this on places like reddit and even the official Eufy community forums here?

Even the new products Eufy are pushing out have this flaw and they have known about it since at least March earlier this year and have done nothing to resolve it. Instead they are pushing to use their cloud services to try to mask the issue, which defeats the main purpose of buying Eufy products since they store footage locally with no subscription fees.

The flaw is that anyone can perform a reset or forced resync on the physical camera or doorbell itself, by simply pushing a paper clip in the reset hole. What's the big deal with that? It deletes all your footage or makes it unviewable. So a thief can empty your house, then on the way out just remember to hold down the button for 10 seconds and the footage is all wiped. They can even steal your doorbell or camera, perform the reset to delete the footage of them stealing it, then re-pair it with their own home base product at home successfully to go on using your product they stole!

Someone has done some testing on this and they say that what is happening basically is that the footage in some cases is kind of still there on the SD card in the home base sometimes, but it's encrypted with a key generated on first pairing of the camera. Because the camera or doorbell camera gets reset, a brand new key gets generated causing all the old footage to be locked. Either way, people have found their footage is not viewable in anyway after a reset even if it does still "exist" on the media.

If you use the doorbells with cameras just as way to see who is at the door, and don't care to rely on it for anything more than that then I guess it's ok. For a security company to leave this flaw in the product though it doesn't look good.
 
I thought they patched this out?

Maybe you are thinking of a different issue? Judging by the thread I linked to in the OP, one of the main guys in that thread keeps regularly pushing Eufy to sort it and it seems to have been constantly "coming soon" and never really fixed.

It's a real shame because the Eufy looks to be one of the only decent ones with Amazon Echo integration (so you can have multiple chimes around the house on all your echos) which does not store the footage in the cloud. So you kill the cloud privacy issue and subscription fees, at the detriment to the actual product flaw of being able to erase footage from the physical device.

Having said that, I agree that if you want it really just solely as a doorbell cam to not miss parcels and simply see who is at the door, it's probably a decent product it would seem. I just read so many bad reviews on literally ALL of the varying types of smart doorbells, mainly complaining of the lag from pressing it and getting alerts/notifications/images out of it, and that the battery life on the battery ones are anything from dire (a few weeks) to 6 month claims. It's a minefield frankly. It's tempting to just simply get a good old wireless doorbell without camera with multiple receivers to place around the house so you have the best chance of not missing deliveries...I mean if you are in and can answer that is.
 
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