Security News
The Biden administration is not planning to step up government surveillance of the U.S. internet even as state-backed foreign hackers and cybercriminals increasingly use it to evade detection, a senior administration official said Friday. The official said the administration, mindful of the privacy and civil liberties implications that could arise, is not currently seeking additional authority to monitor U.S.-based networks.
Hackers gained access to live surveillance cameras installed at Tesla, Equinox, healthcare clinics, jails, and banks, including the Bank of Utah. In addition to images captured from the cameras, the hacker also shared screenshots of their ability to gain root shell access to the surveillance systems used by Cloudflare and at Telsa HQ. According to Tillie Kottmann, a reverse engineer for the group of hackers, they gained access to these surveillance systems using a super admin account for Verkada, a surveillance company who works with all of these organizations.
While controversy over the potential overreach of neighborhood and law-enforcement video surveillance has focused mainly on Ring, an Atlanta-based startup has quietly rolled out its own network of smart surveillance cameras across the country that is again raising questions of privacy and the ire of some advocating it, according to a published report. Langley so far has not responded to an email sent Thursday by Threatpost requesting comments and details about Flock TALON and the technology's privacy protections.
QNAP has addressed a critical security vulnerability in the Surveillance Station app that allows attackers to execute malicious code remotely on network-attached storage devices running the vulnerable software. Surveillance Station is QNAP's network surveillance Video Management System, a software solution that can help users manage and monitor up to 12 IP cameras.
More than 1,200 Iranian citizens have been targeted in extensive cyber-surveillance operations backed by the Iranian government, researchers with cybersecurity firm Check Point report. The attacks, which Check Point refers to collectively as Domestic Kitten, have been ongoing for roughly four years, orchestrated by a threat actor tracked as APT-C-50, which executes the campaigns on behalf of the Iranian government.
A former employee of prominent home security company ADT has admitted that he hacked into the surveillance feeds of dozens of customer homes, doing so primarily to spy on naked women or to leer at unsuspecting couples while they had sex. Authorities say that the IT technician "Took note of which homes had attractive women, then repeatedly logged into these customers' accounts in order to view their footage for sexual gratification." He did this by adding his personal email address to customer accounts, which ultimately hooked him into "Real-time access to the video feeds from their homes."
Eagle Eye Networks shared the trends that will have the biggest impact on video surveillance, security, and use of analytics to drive business intelligence and improvement in 2021. The shift to the benefits of cloud in the video surveillance space are powerful and undeniable, including major cost savings, heightened data security, remote access and maintenance, flexible storage and retention, scalability, increased stability, and disaster recovery.
A warning issued this week by the FBI warns owners of smart home devices with voice and video capabilities that these types of systems have been targeted by individuals who launch so-called "Swatting" attacks. "Smart home device manufacturers recently notified law enforcement that offenders have been using stolen e-mail passwords to access smart devices with cameras and voice capabilities and carry out swatting attacks," the FBI said.
Microsoft has dialed back components of its Productivity Score tool for Microsoft 365 apps following concerns about user privacy. Called Productivity Score, the tool assigns each 365 user in an organization a score out of 100 across categories including communication, meetings, collaboration and teamwork - which can be viewed by admins.
The European Union on Monday agreed to tighten up rules for the sale and export of cybersurveillance technology. EU lawmakers and the European Council reached a provisional deal to update controls of so-called dual use goods such as facial recognition technology and spyware to prevent them from being used to violate human rights.