Hijack of nearly 1.5m surveillance cameras a wake-up call for security industry

Last week hackers managed to bring down a popular security website after hijacking more than a million security cameras.

KrebsOnSecurity.com, which is run by freelance journalist Brian Krebs, was flooded with traffic over the course of two days. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) was a rather pointed attack given Krebs’ record of exposing and reporting on cybercrimes.

Surpassing 660 Gbps of traffic, it was one of the biggest DDoS attacks in history.

The hackers harnessed two ‘botnets’ – networks of devices infected with malware – comprising 980,000 and 500,000 ‘zombie’ devices, according to internet service provider and telecoms giant Level 3 Communications. Most of these devices were internet-connected cameras.

Because everyone wants to be able to connect physical security to their online world, the potential for attacks is only going to increase.” James Wickes, CEO, Cloudview

A cyber security expert protecting the website called it “the biggest attack we’ve ever seen.”

James Wickes, CEO and co-founder of Cloudview, the world’s first corporate grade, cloud-based surveillance solution, said “it highlights that CCTV systems are the second most prevalent internet connected devices, and too often are vulnerable to hacking because they don’t have even the most basic security protections in place.”

“As powerful computers in their own right, they can be used as a Trojan horse to attack corporate networks, or their combined power can be used to attack and bring down servers and entire networks. Worryingly, because everyone wants to be able to connect physical security to their online world, the potential for attacks is only going to increase.”

New front in cyber war

The attack heralds a new front in the cyber war as criminals recognise the vulnerability of proliferating connected devices and ‘things’.

Mostly using direct traffic, this was an unusual DDoS attack. Rather than tricking faulty servers into boosting malicious traffic, as previous DDoS attacks have tended to do, this ‘amplification’ or ‘reflection’ attack compelled the servers to generate multiple response packets for each packet sent.

Wickes said it served as a wake-up call for the physical security industry as it becomes increasingly intertwined with – and replaced by, if they’re not careful – the IT sector.

“This represents either a huge threat or a tremendous opportunity to the security industry,” he said. “The threat is that the IT industry will take over and become the go-to place for secure online products and services.

“The opportunity is for the security industry to rise to the challenge and proactively integrate cyber security services into their IoT products. Clearly, whoever succeeds will win a huge market.

“To quote Rudyard Kipling: ‘NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.’”

Korean firm Hanwha Techwin sought recently to reassure its own customers and called for collaboration across the supply chain to combat the growing hacking threat.

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