Hackers cracked a huge trove of data collected by a Silicon Valley startup and got access to live feeds of 150,000 security cameras inside Tesla, schools, hospitals and prisons, reports say.
The hacking group breached Verkada Inc. to get access to the feeds, which also included police stations, women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals, gyms, and the startup itself, according to Bloomberg.
The hackers also say they have accessed the full video archive of all Verkada customers.
Tillie Kottmann, one of the members of the international hacker collective that breached the company, the hack was done to show how widespread Verkada’s security cameras are and how easily they can be hacked.
“It’s just wild how I can just see the things we always knew are happening, but we never got to see,” said Tillie Kottmann.
The group hacked their way in using an administrator’s password that they reportedly found on the Internet.
The hack let the group access 222 cameras in factories and warehouses used by Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car company.
This also included accessing footage of workers at a Tesla production line in the company’s Shanghai, China.
Another feed showed the hackers police in Stoughton, Massachusetts, interrogating a man in handcuffs.
They also got into the 333 cameras set up in Madison County Jail in Huntsville, Alabama, and the 17 cameras installed at Graham County detention center in Arizona.
And they also accessed the security video feeds from the re-built Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“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,” a Verkada spokesperson told The Independent in a statement.
The hacking group said they lost access to the feeds when Bloomberg contacted Verkada.
On its website, Verkada touts its services by saying, “we’re making security as seamless and modern as the organizations we protect.”
