How safe are CCTV cameras from hacking and how can we protect our surveillance cameras?
Live feed from 150,000 surveillance cameras in hospitals, companies, police, prisons and schools hacked.
Please read the news Link: live feed from 150,000 surveillance cameras in hospitals, companies, police, prisons and schools hacked.
[Comments by: Stas Protassov, Acronis Co-founder and Technology President.]
The hacker group doesn’t seem to be after money – would you classify this as cyber activism or is there a hidden goal?
While the true motivation of the group remains hidden, it looks like cyber activism – a breach aiming to expose the poor security state of CCTV cameras. However, keep in mind that these compromised devices could also be used to install malware and start DDoS attacks, as well as infiltrate connected networks – with profit to be gained.
Do you believe this will reflect poorly on the adoption of facial recognition technology?
It is quite possible that this will further spread the fear of a monitoring state where the privacy of the individual is lost – without a doubt, it will be the biggest privacy concern of the new decade.
How secure are CCTV systems on average? Seems the attack was successful despite being unsophisticated
Unfortunately, CCTV cameras have been attacked successfully for years now – search engines, such as Shodan, show millions of unprotected CCTV cameras exposed to the Internet around the world. For example, two years ago Ring cameras were a huge target.
I’m not surprised this happened – unauthorized access incidents have been an issue for years, it’s sad to see that the awareness is still low. Very often such incidents happen due to bad configuration or weak default passwords that allow the attacker access to the system – as was in this case – but there are many vulnerable systems that cause this as well.
How can companies/people protect themselves from such attacks? Which tools/practices should they use?
They must secure the configuration, restrict access where it must be restricted, remove default accounts and use strong passwords. They also have to update frequently, monitor access logs and separate devices from the rest of the network whenever possible.
As for the public service structures, such as police departments, they could be prohibited by local government from using cloud-based solutions for such purposes.
About Acronis
Acronis unifies data protection and cybersecurity to deliver integrated, automated cyber protection that solves the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security (SAPAS) challenges of the modern digital world. With flexible deployment models that fit the demands of service providers and IT professionals, Acronis provides superior cyber protection for data, applications, and systems with innovative next-generation antivirus, backup, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection management solutions. With award-winning AI-based anti-malware and blockchain-based data authentication technologies, Acronis protects any environment — from cloud to hybrid to on-premises — at a low and predictable cost.
Founded in Singapore in 2003 and incorporated in Switzerland in 2008, Acronis now has more than 1,500 employees in 33 locations in 18 countries. Its solutions are trusted by more than 5.5 million home users and 500,000 companies, including 100% of the Fortune 1000, and top-tier professional sports teams. Acronis products are available through 50,000 partners and service providers in over
