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Hackers say they hacked into the Silicon Valley startup Verkada’s network and gained access to live video feeds from more than 150,000 surveillance cameras the company manages for Cloudflare, Tesla and a host of other organizations.
The group published videos and images that they said were taken from the offices, warehouses and factories of these companies, as well as from cells, psychiatric wards, banks and schools. Bloomberg News, which reported the breach for the first time, said the footage seen by a reporter showed employees of Halifax Health Hospital in Florida attacking a man and arresting him in a bed. Another video showed a man handcuffed at a police station in Stoughton, Massachusetts, being questioned by police officers.
“I don’t think the claim that we ‘hacked the internet’ was ever as accurate as it is now,” Tillie Kottmann, a member of a hacking collective calling herself APT 69420 Arson Cats, wrote on twitter.
Encrypted credentials
Kottmann told Ars that the hack was possible after Verkada exposed an unprotected internal development system for the Internet. It contained credentials for an account that had super administrator rights for the Verkada network. Once inside the network, the hackers said they had access to feeds from 150,000 cameras, some of which provided high-definition video and used facial recognition.
In a statement, a Verkada spokesman wrote: “We have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access. Our internal security team and external security company are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified the authorities. “
A Cloudflare representative, however, wrote:
This afternoon, we were alerted that the Verkada security camera system, which monitors the main entry points and main thoroughfares at some Cloudflare offices, may have been compromised. The cameras were located in officially closed offices almost a year ago. As soon as we became aware of the compromise, we deactivated the cameras and disconnected them from the office networks. To be clear, no customer data or processes were affected by this incident.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kottmann is a Swiss-based software engineer who last year leaked 20 GB of source code and proprietary data from Intel. Other companies whose data has been breached by Kottmann include AMD, Microsoft, Adobe, Lenovo, Qualcomm and Motorola. These breaches also depended on credentials encoded in repositories exposed on the Internet.
Kottman said the hackers collected about 5 GB of data from Verkada, but they could have gotten much more.