BUSINESS MAVERICK INVESTIGATION: Visual surveillance and weak cyber security, Part One: When cameras get dangerous

. The aim: To turn the processors inside the recorders into Bitcoin miners. As the name suggests, Bitcoin miners are computer processors used to generate the online currency, Bitcoin.

Shodan: The search engine for the Internet-of-Things. As part of their research to map hacked and vulnerable Hikvision cameras, the IPVM engineers used Shodan to search for the company’s cameras globally. This is a screenshot of the search results page The results show more than 600,000 Hikvision devices, with just over 4,000 in South Africa indexed in Shodan. At the top of the results list, is a camera in Leeds in the UK with the IP address 86.154.92.0.

And this is where the issue of vulnerable surveillance IP cameras starts to affect not only individuals’ personal privacy and safety, but also the stability of the Internet globally. For a hacker, a known IP address is a one-way ticket into a vulnerable IoT device. And a common strategy involves controlling many of these IoT devices and using them collectively to attack a bigger target.botnet attacks of 2016. Incidentally, IP cameras featured prominently during these attacks.

But in 2017, an independent researcher, known only by the alias Montecrypto, found a major security flaw in some Hikvision IP cameras – one that would be child’s play to exploit, no matter the strength of the password or obscurity of the username. This time, the US government took notice. Montecrypto gave Hikvision two weeks to provide a date by which they would have the update ready, and to explain why there was a backdoor in the first place. If they didn’t, he/she would warn the public and release firmware to disable the backdoor.

Neither Hikvision nor the US Department of Homeland Security ever referred to the vulnerability as a “backdoor”, and instead labelled it a privilege-escalating vulnerability. Whether or not the vulnerability was intentionally planted by Hikvision to spy on customers or a careless mistake, remains a topic of debate in IP surveillance circles.

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