The hackers discovered a huge treasure trove of data collected by a Silicon Valley startup and had access to live feeds from 150,000 security cameras inside Tesla, schools, hospitals and prisons, reports say.
The hacker group violated Verkada Inc. to gain access to the feeds, which also included police stations, women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals, gyms and the startup itself, according to Bloomberg.
Hackers also say they have accessed the full video file for all Verkada customers.
Tillie Kottmann, one of the members of the international hacking collective that breached the company, the hack was made to show how widespread Verkada security cameras are and how easily they can be hacked.
“It’s amazing how I can see the things that we’ve always known are going on, but we’ve never been able to see,” said Tillie Kottmann.
The group hacked using an administrator password that it supposedly found on the Internet.
The hack allowed the group to access 222 cameras in factories and warehouses used by Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car company.
This also included access to images of workers on a Tesla production line in Shanghai, China.
Another feed showed the hacker police in Stoughton, Massachusetts, interrogating a man in handcuffs.
They also entered the 333 cameras installed at Madison County Jail in Huntsville, Alabama, and the 17 cameras installed at the Graham County detention center in Arizona.
They also accessed security video feeds from the rebuilt Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“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 problem, and we have notified law enforcement, “said a Verkada spokesman. The Independent in a statement.
The hacker group said it lost access to feeds when Bloomberg contacted Verkada.
On its website, Verkada advertises its services saying: “We are making security as integrated and modern as the organizations we protect”.