© GettyHackers accessed 150K surveillance cameras inside hospitals, police stations, and Tesla: report
Hackers accessed data from about 150,000 surveillance cameras in a breach that exposed footage from Tesla, hospitals, and police stations, Bloomberg News reported.
The breach affected security camera data provided by Verkada, according to the news outlet. It was reportedly carried out by an international hacking collective that wanted to show how easy it was to breach video surveillance.
Footage seen by Bloomberg shows workers on an assembly line inside of a warehouse in Shanghai. The hackers said they obtained footage from 222 cameras in Tesla factories and warehouses.
Bloomberg reported that footage was also exposed from the offices of software provider Cloudfare, and several hospitals, schools, jails and police stations.
Tillie Kottman, one of the hackers who claimed credit for the breach, told Bloomberg that the group gained "root" access to cameras, allowing them to use the cameras to execute their own code.
The hackers gained access through a "Super Admin" account that allowed them to access all the cameras, and found a user name and password for an administrator account on the internet, Kottman told Bloomberg. The hackers lost access however, after the news outlet contacted Verkada.
A representative for Verkada told Bloomberg "we have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access."
"Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this potential issue," the representative said.
Representatives for Cloudfare and Tesla didn't return a request for comment from Bloomberg.
The Hill has reached out to Verkada, Tesla, and Cloudfare for comment.