80,000 internet-connected cameras still vulnerable after critical patch offered Tens of thousands of internet-facing IP cameras made by China-based Hikvision remain unpatched and exploitable despite a fix being issued for a critical security bug nearly a year ago. Researchers at Cyfirma recently published a report [PDF] claiming they found more than 80,000 cameras in more than 100 countries online, with …
Troll or not (and he is bloody annoying), the matter of US hegemony is a point worth raising.
After all, it's difficult to defend the double standards under which something in China or Iran is worthy of condemnation but the same thing in Saudi Arabia is "a matter of concern" and in Israel "they have a right to defend themselves".
It would be a different matter if we were treated like adults and told "we're concerned about China's economic power and we're trying to stay on top so here are some measures we're taking" (although WTO rules might get somewhat on the way).
Only one camera needs to be compromised to bring down the whole system. You're thinking of filling up the storage device? No, that might trigger monitoring alarms before recording stops.
If you bought Hikvision cameras to save money, it's a good bet that the storage system is cheap too. All a compromised camera needs to do is write one large file (a few TB) to storage then delete it. All but the best NAS will become unresponsive during the delete. Within seconds, all the Hikvision cameras will crash from buffer overflow. Video from the past is lost before any monitors raise an alarm.
Err, much of the problems around this are that they are:
cheap to buy
easy to setup
don not require a stack of funky infrastructure with associated costs.
Much like all the other Internet connect stuff we are now encumbered with. Pretty much anything that can be setup with an App will be connected to the Internet. That covers an awful lot of stuff now.
"who puts their fscking cameras on the net anyway?"
Home users who want 24/7 operation and quite likely don't even have a PC at home any more, at best a laptop, and may only have a tablet or a mobile phone these days. Few will have anything running as a server 24/7 just so their home cameras will work.
Home users who want Internet of Tat gadgets don't want to be bothered with network security, managing servers or any of the stuff we Reg readers think about every day. They just want to plug it in and see it work within 5 minutes of opening the box and following the one page pictorial instruction sheet. That means everything need to be internet facing and talking to cloud providers. They don't care about and don't remember things like entire home automation systems being made redundant because Nest or whoever no longer support the back-end systems any more. Until it bites them. Then they'll moan and move on to the next shiny thing.
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