United States. A group of hackers say they breached a huge trove of security camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada Inc., gaining access to live streams of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, businesses, police departments, prisons and schools, Bloomberg reported.
The companies whose images were exposed include automaker Tesla Inc. and software provider Cloudflare Inc. In addition, hackers were able to watch videos from inside women's health clinics, psychiatric hospitals and Verkada's offices. Some of the cameras, even in hospitals, use facial recognition technology to identify and categorize the people captured in the images. The hackers say they also have access to the full video archive of all Verkada customers.
In a video seen by Bloomberg, a Verkada camera inside the Florida Halifax Health hospital showed what appeared to be eight hospital employees accosting a man and pinning him against a bed. Halifax Health is listed on Verkada's public website in a case study titled, "How a Florida Healthcare Provider Easily Upgraded and Implemented a Scalable HIPAA-Compliant Security System." A Halifax spokesman confirmed that he uses Verkada cameras, but added that "let's laugh that the scope of the situation is limited."
Another video, filmed inside a Tesla warehouse in Shanghai, shows workers on an assembly line. The hackers said they gained access to 222 cameras in Tesla's factories and warehouses.
The data breach was carried out by an international hacker collective and was intended to show the pervasiveness of video surveillance and the ease with which systems can be entered, said Tillie Kottmann, one of the hackers who took credit for breaching Verkada's San Mateo facility. Californi. Kottmann, who uses pronouns of them/them, previously took credit for hacking chipmaker Intel Corp. and automaker Nissan Motor Co. Kottmann said his reasons for hacking are "a lot of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a large dose of anti-capitalism, a dash of anarchism, and it's also too much fun not to."
Source: Bloomberg.
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