A group of hackers said it was able to break into a California-based security company and gain access to more than 150,000 surveillance cameras in prisons, police stations, and international Tesla facilities.
The breach allowed the hacking collective to peer through the lenses of Verkada’s security network, which includes clients such as psychiatric hospitals, women’s health clinics, and even Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of one of the country’s worst school shootings.
The hack was first reported on Tuesday by Bloomberg News, which interviewed Tillie Kottmann, a reverse engineer for the group, which goes by the moniker “Advanced Persistent Threat 69420.”
Kottmann said the reasons behind the hack 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.”
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Kottmann added that the breach “exposes just how broadly we’re being surveilled, and how little care is put into at least securing the platforms used to do so, pursuing nothing but profit.”
“It’s just wild how I can just see the things we always knew are happening, but we never got to see,” Kottmann said.
Verkada, the breached company, was founded in 2016 and sells web-accessible security cameras and related technology. The startup is valued at $1.6 billion, and in January of last year, it hauled in $80 million in venture capital funding.
A Verkada spokesperson said in a statement that the company is investigating the matter.
“We have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access,” the Verkada representative said. “Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this potential issue.”
The hack comes after Verkada received media attention last October when an employee used the company’s cameras and facial-recognition technology to photograph his female colleagues and make sexually explicit jokes about them to a group of other employees.
The hacker group said it was able to capture 4K video sourced from prisons and police stations, including a clip of an officer interviewing a handcuffed suspect. Still images reviewed by Bloomberg News showed cameras at Madison County Jail in Huntsville, Alabama, hidden inside mundane objects in order to track staff and inmates using facial-recognition technology.
The method of breaking into Verkada’s system was not too complicated, according to Kottmann, who said the group found an administrator account’s username and password that was posted to the internet.
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Other facilities and companies where the collective was able to gain access to cameras included a hospital in Texas, high-end gym chain Equinox, Arizona’s Graham County detention facility, software provider Cloudflare, and a Tesla warehouse in Shanghai.
