Cybersecurity experts explain how surveillance footage of Nancy Guthrie's home was recovered
CBSN
Investigators with the FBI and Pima County Sheriff's Department said they were able to recover footage from a Google Nest camera outside the Arizona home of Nancy Guthrie — the missing mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie — by extracting "residual data located in backend systems," raising new questions about how it was possible to retain the video. In:
Investigators with the FBI and Pima County Sheriff's Department said they were able to recover footage from a Google Nest camera outside the Arizona home of Nancy Guthrie — the missing mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie — by extracting "residual data located in backend systems," raising new questions about how it was possible to retain the video.
Retired special agent Jason Pack told CBS News that locating the missing footage of a masked individual outside Guthrie's door was "like finding a needle in a haystack," providing a breakthrough authorities needed more than a week after she was reported missing.
But many are questioning how footage was recovered from a doorbell camera that officials said was disconnected with no active subscription to store video. With a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long after Guthrie was reported missing.
Although Nest users with a free plan cannot access cannot access recordings past a certain time frame, cybersecurity experts say doorbell cameras, like Guthrie's, have built-in backup mechanisms that enable them to store data across multiple layers, which makes short-term recovery possible.
"Internal storage uses a very lazy deletion mechanism, so the data wouldn't be available to users who didn't pay," cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos explained to CBS News. "The video for non-subscribers would be marked for deletion, but depending on the exact implementation details, the actual files might not be deleted for days and the actual data wouldn't be overwritten until the storage was needed."
