Hackers accessed 150K surveillance cameras inside hospitals, police stations and Tesla: report

Hackers accessed data from about 150,000 surveillance cameras in a breach that exposed footage from Tesla, hospitals and police stations, Bloomberg News reported.

The breach affected security camera data provided by Verkada, according to the news outlet. It was reportedly carried out by an international hacking collective that wanted to show how easy it was to breach video surveillance.

Footage seen by Bloomberg shows workers on an assembly line inside a warehouse in Shanghai. The hackers said they obtained footage from 222 cameras in Tesla factories and warehouses.

Bloomberg reported that footage was also exposed from the offices of software provider Cloudflare and several hospitals, schools, jails and police stations.

Cloudfare told The Hill that it was alerted that the security camera system that monitors main entry points and thoroughfares in some of its offices may have been compromised. The cameras were located in offices that had been closed for months.

The company said it disabled the cameras and disconnected them from office networks. The breach doesn’t impact Cloudfare products, and the ocpany said it has no reason to believe that the incident would impact its customers.

Tillie Kottmann, one of the hackers who claimed credit for the breach, told Bloomberg that the group gained “root” access to cameras, allowing them to use the cameras to execute their own code.

The hackers gained access through a “Super Admin” account that allowed them to access all the cameras and found a username and password for an administrator account on the internet, Kottman told Bloomberg. The hackers lost access however, after the news outlet contacted Verkada.

A representative for Verkada told the Hill in a statement “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.”

The Hill has reached out to Tesla for comment.