South Korea’s military recently removed about 1,300 Chinese-made surveillance cameras installed at bases, concerned about potential security risks, Yonhap news agency reported on Friday, September 13, citing an unnamed military official.
The cameras were designed to be connected to a specific server in China, but no actual data was leaked, Yonhap said.
They had been supplied by a South Korean company, with their Chinese origin determined during equipment inspections earlier this year, the report cited the official as saying.
The cameras were not used for guard operations such as along the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, but for monitoring training groups and perimeter fences at bases, the report said.
South Korea’s defense ministry said on Friday it is in the process of collecting the foreign-made cameras and replacing them with others. The ministry declined to confirm where the cameras were made.
Last year, Australia’s foreign minister said its defense and foreign ministries were removing surveillance cameras made by Chinese-run firms from their facilities after reports that the technology posed a security risk.
No matter on which country the iot device it’s made, giving internet access to them in military bases is madness. IOT must be on a separate VLAN without any internet access. No exceptions, they’re usually running buggy firmware based on ancient Linux versions and no updates are ever released or installed. They’re exploitable time bombs
Im surprise they installed them in the first place. First thing I did when somebody gave me TPlink Kasa smart plugs and switches was run the github code to swap the remote server lookup to 127.0.0.1
https://github.com/jkbenaim/hs100 also works on some models not listed
News flash: IoT doesn’t always mean “backend is on AWS.”
Sheesh.
