Camera obscura: Researchers say weak protocols are Achilles’ heel of surveillance cameras
In a world of hackable things, protocols in surveillance cameras sometimes get overlooked. The cameras used in commercial buildings aren’t necessarily a priority for researchers looking for the next big intrusion, and the devices are often seen as one-dimensional targets that only yield the data they collect. But that misses the point of how a camera can be a gateway to other devices in a building. Hacking an internet-connected camera could give an attacker a pathway to a device controlling physical access to a facility, for example. That concern prompted researchers at Forescout Technologies to dissect surveillance cameras in their test lab in the Netherlands. What they found were widely used cameras using weak communication protocols to transmit data over unencrypted channels. The researchers were able to carry out a “man-in-the-middle attack,” which intercepts and manipulates data, to replace footage recorded by the camera with their own. Altering security footage at an airport, for example, could be […]
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