South Korea’s military has been forced to remove over 1,300 surveillance cameras from its bases after learning that they could be used to transmit signals to China, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
The cameras, which were supplied by a South Korean company, “were found to be designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally by connecting to a specific Chinese server,” the outlet reported an unnamed military official as saying.
Korean intelligence agencies discovered the cameras’ Chinese origins in July during an examination of military equipment, the outlet said.
How the fuck did that happen?
Dear south korean government
please hire me instead. I promise I’m so paranoid, this will never happen.
Stuff like this is why I have to tell our Chinese CFO why we don’t want Huawei network devices. Yes Jeff, I know they are cheap as shit, you cheapskate, but you don’t put the cheapest solution in place to run your critical systems on!
Yes Jeff, I know they are cheap as shit, you cheapskate
Remind me again why you’d want an Apple (made in China) or OnePlus (made in China) or any of the other 70% of all cell phones available in the US? Are you just a big fan of paying extra for the same technology?
Or are you more wedded to phones made in Malaysia, India, or Vietnam for some peculiar reason?
you don’t put the cheapest solution in place
No shortage of high end Huawei models. They’ve been competitive with Samsung for nearly a decade.
Don’t all cheap IP cameras feed back to at least one server in China?
I bought two different no-name brands from Amazon several years back, and both models of them were trying to call home. I ran them on an isolated network, so they couldn’t get anywhere, but they were persistent little buggers. Oh, and the root password to one of them was hardcoded to “1234567” lol
Tangent, but if anyone can recommend a good IP camera that just craps out an RTSP stream locally and doesn’t phone home anywhere, DM me lol.
I’m really surprised that military in such a technologically advanced country just connected random IP cams to the internet
From the Yonhap article,
The company that supplied the cameras is suspected to have falsified the equipment’s country of origin, and the military is considering taking legal action against it.
And also,
military and intelligence authorities found out the surveillance cameras supplied by a South Korean company were produced in China during military equipment examinations
The TLDR is that these cameras were supposed to be sourced domestically but the company behind it committed fraud to make a quick buck.
If they found out it goes to a specific server, why not just block the server and maybe isolate the network from the internet? I guess its easier to replace them but what’s to say the replacements can’t have the same flaw if other precautions aren’t in place, like how do you even get to installing cameras on military bases without thoroughly vetting the firmware on them fist?
I wonder if this was the case. From the bloomberg article,
“No data has actually been leaked,” they added.
And from Yonhap,
found to be designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally
So maybe they were designed that way, but it didn’t work because the cam network was offline?
Keep in mind that this was on the border with North Korea, so, they’d (the South Korean military) have a very high level of paranoia on being hacked to begin with.
