Big brother is watching you | Hacker News Reader

Big brother is watching you

big-brotha.appspot.com

38 pointslemieux22 comments

Techcrunch had a post about this particular webcam exploit a few days ago: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/thousands-of-webcams-made-p...

Beyond bug exploits, many webcams are never secured. Arstechnica showed not long ago how easy it was to find them online: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/01/one-mans-journ...

Around 20 million IP cameras are sold every year, and the figure is growing by around 20% a year ( e.g., see http://www.yanoresearch.com/press/press.php/000597 )

Surely at least some governments know how to access all those webcams...

I found a screensaver a couple of years ago that did basically the same thing (http://i.document.m05.de/?page_id=438), and I improved on it some (quadrupled the outputs).

Shameless plug: I don't know if it still works, but if you have a Mac you could try: http://lost-found.se/projects/surveillance-saver-quad/

All of these cameras are IP cameras made by TRENDnet, they have since discovered the exploit and patched it. If you have an IP camera manufactured by TRENDnet, go here: http://www.trendnet.com/products/features.asp?featureid=52

There's not a lot of explanation as to what''s going on here. Are these security cameras which are exposed to the Internet for some reason or other? If so, I'm glad none are watching me. It might be fun to figure where some of them are.

One of them was pointed at a crib with a child moving around in it. The rest were the empty insides of houses for me. One of them looked like it was on a shelf behind some glass figurines (hidden camera?).

I don't think that these a 'security cameras' as in corporation/government-owned.

Edit:

* The URLs all follow the same format: "http://IP/anony/mjpg.cgi "

* 'mjpg' is a video format[1]

* More discussion on these URLs. I assume that the users are getting it from the same source.[2]

* And... the source is here[3]

* It's possibly NSFW[4]:

   I randomly clicked this one first and
   immediately saw a little naked girl
   around 7 or 8 years old walking  
   around.. :sick:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG

[2] http://hypebeast.com/forums/off-topic/164209/?topic_page=2

[3] http://pastebin.com/CZHTGtXA

[4] http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/t-645837-p-3.html

    One of them looked like it was on a shelf behind
    some glass figurines (hidden camera?)

Sounds like a nanny cam.

"I don't think that these a 'security cameras' as in corporation/government-owned."

At least some of them are. I saw a few which were watching storefronts and barber shops. They looked like CCTV footage.

There was a blogpost [1] a month or so ago showing a backdoor to some webcams. The urls on the map look to be using this method in conjunction with some sort of ip-location lookup.

[1] http://console-cowboys.blogspot.com/2012/01/trendnet-cameras...

Got a few babies, some stores, some dude drinking coffee, mostly seems to be security stuff and about half of them seem to be turned off.

I guess these are cameras exposed to the Internet without their owners actually knowing about it. I guess it was made by simply looping through all IP addresses to check if the "/anony/mjpg.cgi" exists.

Weird but fun in an odd way.

Same. Lots of driveways as well. I wish there were a better display of which cameras are active, because the map view is rather inconvenient to browse.

It’s eerily fascinating to look at these feeds of people just going about their lives, totally unaware of being viewed. If I watch for long, though, I get strangely anxious that I’ll witness a crime or something, report it because I’m like that, and then have to explain how I knew about it. Although hey, maybe it’d be a good way to start a career as a psychic.

Some of them might not have the ports open, or they have patched the bug with the new firmware. If you get a login prompt, they patched it. Still, very creepy. Glad to see that the manufacturer patched so quickly after discovery.

Psychic? They'll probably think you did it.

I didn't understand what this was from the title. Even though I saw no people, I feel like I got suckered into violating people's privacy. I assumed this was some kind of map of public cameras or something. It wasn't until I came back and read the comments here that I understood what was going on. The app should at least have some explanatory text so visitors can make a moral decision for themselves.

could be worse, could be your university has high-quality webcams installed all over campus and they're visible from the global internet: http://www.albertwavering.com/creepumd/

I was going to say that having a few webcams watching the campus wasn't that bad, but I gotta admit streaming the camera overlooking the gym treadmills is kinda creepy...

that is crazy creepy

This is a horrible post, frankly. Please provide some level of context rather than simply, as others have stated, dropping me into watching someone else's webcam with questionable legality.

Is it down? All I see is google maps.

The link is dead. How ominous.

none of the links on the map work for me

This is truly frightening and interesting at the same time. How are so many of these Trendnet IP cameras just exposed to the public internet with their own IP addresses? And I'd like to know why do so many people use security cameras to record video of nothing in particular (empty warehouses, the street, etc).

FYI these cameras were found to have a backdoor to view the images:

http://www.webpronews.com/security-cameras-hacked-2012-02

I only clicked a couple of live ones before it creeped me out too much.

But one I saw gave a clue as to why some people might be recording the street, empty warehouses, etc..

It showed some kind of outdoor breezeway with various doors around, and the heading (I guess webcam owners can configure a title?) was "Black people were here".

It seems like the company should take some responsibility to actively contact owners about this (hugely serious) issue, in a way that non-technical users would be able to understand. After all, there are IP addresses -- it's not as easy as a phone number, but wouldn't many ISPs cooperate & help them contact users?

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