Four people have been arrested in South Korea for hacking into homemade surveillance cameras installed in homes or businesses. Their goal was to obtain sexually motivated recordings to sell on an international porn website.
The four suspects were not acting together, according to Korean authorities. They were arrested separately. These types of cameras, called IP (“Internet Protocol” in English), which are connected to the network so that their owners can see them from other places, are popular for monitoring children, the elderly, pets, or for security reasons. But transmitting content over the Internet makes them extremely vulnerable. These are devices that come with passwords pre-installed at the factory, which, if not changed, can be easily traced or exploited by hackers. Hackers. On the Internet there are popular pages that broadcast live from tens of thousands of cameras, most of them in public places or outdoors.
One of the detainees, who is unemployed, was able to access 63,000 cameras, create 545 videos with sexual content, and earn about 20,000 euros in cryptocurrencies by selling them. The other suspect is an office employee who had access to 70,000 cameras, produced 648 videos and received around 10,000 euros. These clips, which exceed a thousand, constitute, according to the authorities, 62% of the material published on the international porn site, which contains recordings from several countries. Korean police are working with authorities in other countries to try to shut it down.
The other two were arrested Hacked Fewer cameras and they didn’t market the content, they stored it on their own devices. The authorities reported that 58 victims had suffered from this the pirate. South Korean police also arrested three people who purchased this type of material online, which is also a crime.
Despite the scale and consequences of this attack, similar cases are common due to easy access for someone with some technical knowledge. Last November, a similar case appeared in India: Hackers They have sold about 50,000 clips taken from hospitals, schools and homes across the country. The authorities explained the simplicity of the technical process thanks to the use of three pieces of software used to find cameras in a specific area, open ports that allow remote communication, and then gain more sophisticated access to their passwords.
There have been other notable cases that have come to light in recent years, such as a 2021 vulnerability of 150,000 Verkada cameras or a report from June of this year where they found more than 40,000 security cameras broadcast openly on the Internet.
Conclusion from this Superhero is that there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of cameras positioned within public and private buildings that can be easily accessed remotely. The combination of insecure devices, uninformed users, and the density of cameras of this type creates an ecosystem vulnerable to widespread abuse. The best solution, according to specialists, is to change the passwords that come from the factory by default, updates Firmware (the internal software that allows the device to function) and restrict remote access.