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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Is it safe to assume all these networks have been pwned by, at a minimum, the Russians, Chinese and Israelis as well as, in all likelihood, a not-insignificant number of tech-savvy criminal syndicates.

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It sounds pretty plausible. But, I'm not sure what benefit that gives them? The article says the cameras are trained on public spaces. So in principle they (China, Russia, etc.) could get the same information by having an agent just hang out there (yeah, I know, the same can be said for the DC Police). So pwning the CCTV cameras probably doesn't give them access to any sensitive or novel information.

If you have access you can probably disrupt or modify things when the need arises (making this kind of system even more pointless for their declared purpose than they already are).

> they...could get the same information by having an agent just hang out there

Now those agents can do other things.

Probably not. There really isn't much upside in being able to monitor all those cameras all the time... how would you be able to make money with it? That said, I know some of the pole mounted systems are running a WiFi AP so that an officer doesn't need to get a cherry picker in order to pull video.

A state actor could probably own them one at a time through the AP, but its unlikely that is what happened here.

for the past ten years, no one has cared that virtually any hacking group is roughly as powerful as J. Edgar Hoover, and more dangerous. At least he wasn't anonymous.

http://fusion.net/story/212802/haunted-by-hackers-a-suburban...

For some reason there has been zero coverage that 10,000 databases were open to be ransomware.

I've come across Tor onion sites that provide access to numerous surveillance camera systems ;)

(Serious question) Where do you hang out to come across such sites? IRC channels, specific onion sites?

I was bored, and browsing Harry71's onion-index site. Which has been down for a few weeks.

Do you need onion sites? Couldn't shodan give you those?

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