They hack private monitoring cameras. They watch through them if … the enemy's fire went

Iran tries to hack surveillance cameras in Israel to facilitate the more precise fire in the armed conflict on a week – Bloomberg said on Friday. Earlier, Russia and the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas used the same tactics.

“We know that in the last two or three days the Iranians have tried to connect with cameras to find out where their rockets hit and increase the precision of attacks,” said the Israeli agency specialist in the cyber security Refael Franco. He recommended that residents turn off home surveillance cameras or change their passwords to them.

Hamas broke into private safety cameras before the invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. – said Gaby Portnoy, cited by Bloomberg, until recently the head of the National Cyber ​​security organization in Israel. “For years thousands of cameras have been hacked and used to collect intelligence information,” he emphasized.

A similar tactic was used by Russia, which, according to the US intelligence, before aggression to Ukraine “used access to private cameras in key places, such as border crossings, military installations and railway stations”.

The government in Kiev banned monitoring cameras in 2022, justifying that Russia uses them to plan air attacks. The following year, he called for camera owners to stop online. “Russia uses the susceptibility of modern cameras (for hacking – PAP) to carry out rocket attacks on Ukraine and adapts them in real time” – the authorities reported at that time.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of Chinese spy equipment in 2022citing the considerations of national security.

Most consumers when buying a monitoring system are guided by the price, not the level of security – said Peleg Wasserman, responsible for the security of the energy company.

“Consumers must remember that they are not the only ones who may have access to this camera,” said Wasserman.

In his opinion, customers can unconsciously film a sensitive object or panorama of the city “very useful when aiming”. In addition, private monitoring cameras often have a default password, and some systems automatically send recorded material to the Internet.

For countries in a state of war, data leakage may prove to be an Achilles heel – Bloomberg emphasized. In 2022, the Israeli Cybernetic Agency warned that hackers could access tens of thousands of monitoring cameras. After Hamas attack, it turned out that private security systems belonging to the kibbutz located in the area of ​​the Gaza Strip were hacked.

Most people are not aware of the potential double use of industrial cameras and threats it brings. “You want to protect yourself, and meanwhile you expose yourself,” said Franco. (PAP)

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