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.
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,
And also,
The TLDR is that these cameras were supposed to be sourced domestically but the company behind it committed fraud to make a quick buck.