A new report reveals that militaries are increasingly hacking into insecure, consumer-grade security cameras to conduct wartime surveillance. Iranian-linked hackers have targeted cameras around the Middle East, apparently to monitor strikes and assess damage from recent attacks.
This tactic is now a standard part of military playbooks, as seen with Israel reportedly accessing Tehran's traffic cameras and Russia and Ukraine hacking each other's systems. These networked cameras provide a cheap, high-resolution alternative to traditional military reconnaissance like satellites.
The main topics covered are the militarization of hacked consumer security cameras, specific incidents involving Iran, Israel, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the shift in surveillance tactics.
For decades, satellites, drones, and human spotters have all been part of war’s surveillance and reconnaissance tool kit. In an age of cheap, insecure, Internet-connected consumer devices, however, militaries have gained another powerful set of eyes on the ground: every hackable security camera installed outside a home or on a city street, pointed at potential bombing targets.
On Wednesday, Tel Aviv–based security firm Check Point released new research describing hundreds of hacking attempts that targeted consumer-grade security cameras around the Middle East—with many apparently timed to Iran’s recent missile and drone strikes on targets that included Israel, Qatar, and Cyprus. Those camera-hijacking efforts, some of which Check Point has attributed to a hacker group that’s been previously linked to Iranian intelligence, suggest that Iran’s military has tried to use civilian surveillance cameras as a means to spot targets, plan strikes, or assess damage from its attacks as it retaliates for the US and Israeli bombings that have sparked a widening war in the region.
Iran wouldn’t be the first to adopt that camera-hacking surveillance tactic. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli military had accessed “nearly all” the traffic cameras in Iran’s capital of Tehran and, in partnership with the CIA, used them to target the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In Ukraine, the country’s officials have warned for years that Russia has hacked consumer surveillance cameras to target strikes and spy on troop movements—while Ukrainian hackers have hijacked Russian cameras to surveil Russian troops and perhaps even to monitor its own attacks.
Exploiting the insecurity of networked civilian cameras is, in other words, becoming part of the standard operating procedures of armed forces around the world: A relatively cheap and accessible means of getting eyes on a target hundreds of thousands of miles away. “Now hacking cameras has become part of the playbook of military activity,” says Sergey Shykevich, who leads threat intelligence research at Check Point. “You get direct visibility without using any expensive military means such as satellites, often with better resolution.”
Meridiano
