A group of hackers claims to have broken into the networks of the start of Verkada cloud-based surveillance, gaining unfiltered access to thousands and thousands of real-time security camera feeds in the process.
The hack first gained public attention on Tuesday afternoon, when a Twitter user named “Tillie” began leaking alleged images of the hack on the Internet: “Have you ever wondered what a @ store is like? Tesla? ” the hacker joked, posting a picture of what appears to be an industrial facility.
Tillie, who goes by the full name of Tillie Kottmann and uses pronouns, is allegedly part of an international hacker collective responsible for breaching Verkada, according to a report of Bloomberg. Once inside, hackers were able to use the company’s security sources to delve into the internal workings of numerous organizations, including medical facilities, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, schools and police departments, and even big companies like Tesla, Equinox and Cloudflare. The scope of the hack seems massive.
Among other things, Kottmann hinted Tuesday that they could have used their access to Verkada to hack the laptop of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:
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The hacker group has caught the public’s attention in a very remarkable way, calling the intrusion campaign “Operation Panopticon” and claiming that they want toend surveillance capitalism”, Drawing attention to the ways in which ubiquitous surveillance dominates people’s lives. It looks like the group is leaving of the nickname “Arson Cats” and is also called “APT“ in reference to the way the threat growsps are labeled as “advanced persistent threats” by security research companies.
According to Bloomberg, “Arson Cats” accessed the company through a rather massive security flaw: hackers discovered a password and username for a Verkada administrative account publicly exposed on the Internet. In a Twitter message, Tillie reiterated this to Gizmodo, stating that once the administrator account (called a “super administrator”) was compromised, they could connect to any of the 150,000 video channels in the Verkada library.
“The access we had allowed us to impersonate any user of the system and access their view of the platform,” said the hacker, adding that “super-administrator rights are also what allowed us to access the root shell at the click of a button “.
When asked if there was a political message behind piracy, Tillie said part of the fact was that they hated “surveillance capitalism.”
“Yeah, I guess I hate capitalism in general, with surveillance capitalism being a particularly horrible and disgusting part,” the hacker said. “However, the information that has given us access to these camera information channels has also provided us with a very interesting way to see things that we all know happen behind closed doors, but that in general can never be seen.”
As of publication, Verkada representatives could not be reached for comment. Emails sent to Tesla and Equinox have not yet received a response. A Cloudflare representative sent the following message:
This afternoon we were warned that Verkada’s security camera system that controls the main entry points and main routes of a handful of Cloudflare offices may have been compromised. The cameras were located in a handful of offices that have been officially closed for several months. As soon as we realized the commitment, we turned off the cameras and disconnected them from the office networks. To be clear, this incident does not affect Cloudflare products and we have no reason to believe that an incident involving office security cameras will affect customers.