Security expert cancels talk on back of legal threat
Important security research into hackable surveillance cameras has been quashed by a legal threat. Gianni Gnesa, a consultant at the Swiss cyber-security company, Ptrace Security was due to give a lecture on Thursday at Singapore's Hack in the Box conference. And he would have too, if his research didn't reveal that some of IP surveillance cameras have considerable vulnerabilities in them.
Gnesa picked three IP cameras, bought from Amazon, to exhibit. He told SCMagazineUK.com that he chose these models “because they had a good rating, thousands of customer reviews, and they claimed to be secure”. In fact, he said, they were anything but.
While the vendors' descriptions made large claims about how secure their cameras were, Gnesa found undocumented backdoors and remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. Hacking the cameras could allow the attacker to gain admin access and eavesdrop on the video feed.
