The Next Goal Of Internet Black Production: How Much Privacy Is A Webcam?

With the development of the Internet of things, cameras have become an ordinary object in people's lives. Whether in public or private space, the original intention of people to install cameras is for safety or convenience. But now, many black production groups use cameras as new targets of attack, and they become hidden dangers of people's privacy.

This is not alarmist talk. In February 12th this year, the national Internet Emergency Center issued an early warning report. "Recently, hackers abroad claimed that they would launch cyber attacks on China in mid February, targeting many video surveillance systems in China, and releasing a number of relevant video surveillance systems in their domestic IP addresses."

In March 10th, the key infrastructure security emergency response center of the national Internet Emergency Center released a report that in the past half a month, the number of malicious code attacks on Internet specific vulnerabilities has reached 67 million times, and a single organization has attempted to attack one hundred thousand IP addresses. It can be considered that whenever the Internet of things devices are exposed to the Internet, they may be attacked at any time and may be repeatedly attacked by different organizations.

How many cameras are there on the Internet? The previously released "2018 camera safety report" has statistics. As of the end of November 2018, there are 26 million 350 thousand cameras in 8063 cities in 228 countries, which have access to the public network. Among them, China ranked third, a total of 1 million 650 thousand.

This shows that there are not a few cameras in an unsafe state. In March 25th, the twenty-first Century economic report reporter interviewed the Tencent Guardian program security expert whose name is KK. He said that in the confrontation with cybercrime, crime is always ahead. This also requires us to always pay attention to the development of network security, especially in the era of technological change, especially vulnerable to technical loopholes.

But KK also said that there is no need to panic too much for network security. The domestic security companies also precipitated many methodologies in the process of combating black production, so long as they can ensure timely control and vigilance of new technologies, they can still play a great defensive role.

Evil desires

The emergence of network black production is driven by interests. What are the benefits behind the camera? KK told reporters that the black chain could be divided into three parts, namely, the development and sale of the camera crack tool, the webcam scanning and the video camera collection and sale.

Among them, the development and sale of camera cracking tools are at the top of the chain of black production. The software developed by the black production group that has the capability of technology has the scanning function, which can acquire the camera ID in batches, and then detect the weak password.

The "webcam scanning" is the middle reaches of the black production chain. After obtaining the upstream crack tools, some black production groups began to attack network cameras in large quantities. When they successfully got the webcam logo ID, they sold them in bulk. In foreign communications tools, it was found that someone had 198 dollars to pack and sell 500 cameras ID.

KK told reporters that in the sale of camera ID link, some black workers will be screened by ID one by one, and then there will be private citizens' privacy, especially some sensitive pictures of ID, sold separately, and often such ID can be sold at a higher price.

The downstream of the black chain is the direct sale of camera videos. When the black production group gets a large number of videotapes or video surveillance videos, such as those in residential areas, stations, hotels and other privacy venues, it will mark the price according to the sensitivity and privacy level, and then sell other black gangs mainly to "pornographic websites" to achieve profits.

There are different ways of making profit in the upper and lower reaches of the camera chain. A network security and crime researcher told reporters that judging from the existing case results, more than 50% of crimes committed through video cameras were used for extortion. But it should be noted that it also includes those cases targeted at a victim, specially installed camera shooting and extortion.

Another Internet security official said that the existence of black Internet is due to the fact that some people are willing to pay for it. Like camera piracy, the ultimate goal is to get a privacy picture, because they know that some people are willing to spend money to satisfy their desires.

Recently, the N house incident in South Korea has been booming, and the topic of privacy protection is heating up again. But KK frankly said that the current level of domestic black production, whether refined or the maturity of the industrial chain, has already taken the lead in the world. Moreover, with the continuous suppression of the domestic security industry and government departments, some black gangs are beginning to move overseas.

"Black production uses platform tools such as dark net, because its concealment, including many black capital, has begun to use bitcoin, which has brought difficulties to the tracing and tracing of black products, but this is also a global problem. However, the industry chain of black production has become very long now. As long as there is a loophole in one link, some clues can be found. " KK said.

Weak sense of security is the biggest loophole.

According to KK, at present, there are several ways that black gang attacks webcam. First, aiming at the camera terminal, the black gang can get sensitive information such as hardware coding and so on through debugging the interface firmware on the camera hardware and tampering with the serial number of the device.

The two is for mobile phone end camera applications, black gangs will be static decompile, through communication security for middleman attacks and protocol capture and decoy; three is for the cloud, some camera data will be transmitted to the cloud, hackers through infiltration WEB access to the sub domain name of the interface, for information theft.

In the process of confrontation with black production, KK found that there are some difficulties in the security protection of cameras. He said that webcam as an IOT device itself is prone to technical loopholes, while some software is solidified on hardware, which is difficult to update and fill in time.

More importantly, most users do not have enough security awareness of cameras. "When they choose to buy cameras, they will only look good or not, and do not understand the security of the network, and many users will use the weak password or the default password directly to buy the camera, which has left an opportunity for the black production group." KK said.

A brand webcam developer told the twenty-first Century economic report that the mainstream Camera Companies in the market will put security in a very important position. However, no one dares to make a one hundred percent guarantee on security issues, and the main reason for the current privacy leakage is due to the user's carelessness.

For camera manufacturers, KK also suggests that users should be banned from using the default username and password directly. At the same time, for personal users, KK suggests that we should try to use complex passwords and modify them regularly. Besides, cameras should not be in private space such as beds or bathrooms.

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