A group of hackers has reportedly breached a huge collection of security-camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada, gaining access to live streams of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, police departments, prisons, schools, and companies including Tesla.
Bloomberg reports that a group of hackers claim to have breached a massive trove of security-camera data collected by the Silicon Valley startup firm Verkada. The hackers have allegedly gained access to the live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, police departments, companies, prisons, and schools.
Companies whose footage was exposed in the hack include Elon Musk’s electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and cloud infrastructure firm Cloudflare. Hackers were also reportedly able to view video footage from inside women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and even the offices of Veraka itself.
Some of the cameras, including those in hospitals, use facial-recognition technology to identify and categorize people captured in the footage. The hackers also claim to have access to the full video archives of all Verkada customers.
Bloomberg reports that it has seen footage from a Verkada camera inside Florida hospital Halifax Health showing what appears to be hospital staffers tackling a man and pinning him to a bed. Halifax Health is feature on Verkada’s website in a case study titled: “How a Florida Healthcare Provider Easily Updated and Deployed a Scalable HIPAA Compliant Security System.”
Another video shot inside Tesla’s plant in Shanghai shows workers on an assembly line. The hackers claim to have obtained access to 222 cameras in Tesla factories and warehouses.
The hack was carried out by an international collective of hackers and intended to show the pervasiveness of video surveillance and how easy these systems can be accessed, said Tillie Kottmann, one of the hackers who has claimed credit for breaching Verkada.
Kottmann previously alleged to have hacked the chipmaker Intel and car manufacturer Nissan Motor. Kottmann said that the motivation to hack comes from “lots of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a huge dose of anti-capitalism, a hint of anarchism — and it’s also just too much fun not to do it.”
A Verkada spokesperson commented on the hack stating: “We have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access. Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified law enforcement.”
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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