Security firm probes hack of ‘150,000 cameras’

A California firm is investigating a massive hack said to have affected 150,000 of its security cameras.

Hackers claim to have breached Verkada, a security company that provides cameras to companies including carmaker Tesla.

Stolen footage includes the insides of hospitals, schools and companies, Bloomberg reports.

Verkada told the BBC they were “investigating the scale and scope of this issue”.

The company also told the BBC they had notified law enforcement. However, they did not confirm the size and scale of the hack, reported by Bloomberg.

It is claimed hackers were able to view videos from inside women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals, prisons and even the offices of Verkada itself.

Companies whose footage may have been exposed include carmaker Tesla and software provider Cloudflare.

Cloudflare told the BBC that they had been alerted to a “handful” of cameras that may have been compromised.

In other footage, a Verkada camera inside a Florida hospital reportedly showed what appeared to be eight hospital staffers tackling a man and pinning him to a bed.

Another video showed officers in a police station in Stoughton, Massachusetts questioning a man in handcuffs.

Another inside a Tesla warehouse in Shanghai showed people working on an assembly line.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify these videos.

The hackers also say they gained access to the security cameras of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed more than 20 people in 2012.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Tille Kottmann claimed credit for hacking into Verkada’s systems.

The reasons for the hack, Kottmann said, were, “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.”

The attack was reportedly unsophisticated – they gained access to Verkada through a “Super Admin” account.

Bloomberg says that after they contacted Verkada, the hackers lost access to the video feeds and archives.

A spokesperson for Verkada told the BBC: “We have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorised 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 company has also set up a support line for their costumers to address their issues.

Meanwhile Cloudflare told the BBC: “This afternoon we were alerted that the Verkada security camera system that monitors main entry points and main thoroughfares in 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.”

Tesla has yet to comment.

The breach comes after further details of a hack on Microsoft Exchange are beginning to emerge.

The attack used previously unknown flaws in the email software – and sometimes stolen passwords – to steal data from targets’ networks.