An international hacker collective managed to hack through security camera data collection as well as the live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras. The security data breach was made into the Silicon Valley Startup Verkada Inc.
In addition, hackers claim they got access to all the video archives of the company.
About Varkada Inc.
Verkada is headquartered in San Francisco, USA. It offers security camera systems with cloud-based internet of things platform. The users of the system can access and manage the security camera systems using the internet. It was founded in the year 2016 by Benjamin Bercovitz, Filip Kaliszan, and James Ren. Verkada Inc. managed to touch the benchmark of $540 million valuations in just three years in the market. Big firms like Sequoia Capital have invested in the company.
The initial investigation revealed that the hackers used an unsophisticated method to gain access to Verkada using a Super Admin account. One of a hacker, Kottman revealed that they found the user name and password exposed on the internet.
The hackers also claimed that they got through multiple locations like Equinox, Wadley Regional Medical Center, Temple St. Luke’s Hospital, and many more. Additionally, the hackers were able to access security cameras inside psychiatric hospitals, women’s clinics, Tesla, Cloudfare Inc., and Verkada itself.
Apart from the security camera footage and access, the hackers were able to download the list of Verkada employees and the balance sheets as well.
Among many clients of Verkada Inc. are police departments, hospitals, prisons, schools, and companies from various locations some of which use facial recognition technology to identify people based on the camera footage.
Some of the footage of the hacked security camera systems includes:
- Eight hospital staff tackling a man in Florida Hospital Halifax Health.
- Workers in an assembly line in Tesla set up in Shanghai, China.
- Police officers questioning a suspect in handcuffs in Stoughton, Massachusetts.
- Security camera footage of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, etc.
Earlier in October 2020, Verkada fired its three employees who were found guilty of taking pictures of female employees and make sexually explicit jokes about them.
Aftermath:
Verkada spokesman made a statement after the incident earlier this week in which he claimed that the company has disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access. Also, he claimed that the law information agencies have been informed and the company’s internal security team and some external security firms are investigating the incident.
The company has set up a support line for the customers to address as well.
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The incident must come as a wake-up call for IT companies that a lot is to be done to reduce the vulnerabilities and putting a question mark on the authenticity of the surveillance.
