A group of hackers claimed to have breached Verkada, the video-surveillance service provider, resulting in access to 150,000 cameras. Among them were cameras installed at Tesla factories, at Cloudflare, as well as in hospitals, police stations and other locations, according to Bloomberg.
The hackers claim they also had access to the full video archive of all Verkada customers.
Some cameras are equipped with facial-recognition technology. Verkada devices can identify people by their gender, the colour of their clothing and other attributes, writes Vice.
A certain Tillie Kottmann, who claims to be involved in the breach, named the hacker group behind it as APT-69420 Arson Cats.
He noted that the hackers gained access to Verkada through an administrator account. The username and password were found on the network.
According to Kottmann, the breach was aimed at demonstrating the ubiquity of surveillance and the ease of attacking such systems.
Kottmann noted that after media contacted Verkada, the hackers lost access to the cameras and video archives. Verkada has launched an investigation.
Experts have repeatedly warned about the dangers of deploying facial-recognition-enabled surveillance due to the risk of unauthorised access.
Last year, the darknet saw the sale of access to all Moscow surveillance cameras.
Read more about the fight against facial-recognition technology, using the Clearview case, in ForkLog’s exclusive.
Facial recognition, racism and the police: the story of a startup
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