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Google Exposes Web Surveillance Cams
An anonymous reader writes "Blogs and message forums buzzed this week with the discovery that a pair of simple Google searches permits access to well over 1,000 unprotected surveillance cameras around the world - apparently without their owners' knowledge." Apparently many of the cams are even aimable. Oops!
This just underlines the engineer's problem with making something secure, yet making sure every moron in the U.S. can plug it in and turn it on and have it basically work.
meh
It should be obvious, but any web server that doesn't want to be on google should serve up the appropriate robots.txt file. This includes webcams in their default configuration.
main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+ O);}
LN2 is cool!
Since most of them are being used as simple security cameras for simi-public areas, there really isn't much secret data that is going to be discovered..
So you can watch cars in a parking lot.. Or people mill around the mall...Big risk there..
I don't see a big deal that most of them are not being locked down. Unless i missed something here..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is a good example of why you SHOULD trust some other company. Chances are that company knows more than you do about setting up a system. Choosing the right people to work with is obviously important. I wouldn't trust myself to set up an alarm system for my offices, I would hire someone who knew what they were doing.
Most of the good cameras out there have built-in webservers. Sending motion JPEG over a network from the embedded webserver on the camera is the most common and efficient way to manage a larger camera installation, especially if you are recording. If you have a school district with 10 sites, 5 cameras each, using a network video system and central recording is a fraction of the cost of a traditional CCTV or even DVR (digital recording of analog cameras) setup. Configuring the camera incorrectly leads to problems like this, taking a step backwards to CCTV or other technology is not the answer.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Maybe it's the paranoid dad in me, but while it may be nice to see what my kids and teachers are doing, it scares me that some pediphile may be watching what kids are doing, learning their favorite activites, and their overall daily schedule. The ped could even be a parent that has a kid registered at the school making access even easier. So in the end, I axed schools that has cams (especially wireless ones) and convinced my wife based on the reasons above.
You sound totally paranoid. The driver of your school bus could be a pedo. In fact don't take your kid to the beach, a pedo-infested hunting ground. Statistically walking down the street your kid may pass a few.
Despite what the media may say, the world is populated by mostly normal people. Teaching your kid the dangers and a bit of common sense, and a CCTV camera by the school gates where the kids are picked up, should ensure nothing happens. Please don't inflict your irrational fears on your kids, the media and certain Prominent Politicians will be doing far too much of that already.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
You are an idiot. It is an order of magnitude more likely that your child would be raped/coerced to sex by your brother, uncle, father, cousin or another relative. Not to mention that you are extremely likely to mess up the life of the child in the future with your paranoia. No, Cindy, you can't go on a hiking trip with your class, a pervert may be hiding in the woods. No, Cindy, you can't go to a prom, there might be a paedophile there. No, Cindy, I don't like that boyfriend of yours, he seems to be sexually attracted to young girls. Meanwhile you probably secretly fantasize about having sex with underage cheerleaders yourself...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
OK, so you can do a Google search for part of the URL and find all of the cameras that Google knows about.
But why does Google know about them in the first place?
Google (or any other indexing bot) can't find web pages that don't have a link to them. And, typically, they can only find sites that have links from other sites, or that have been "suggested" to the search engine by a user.
So, somebody put a link to the webcam in a publically-accessible page somewhere. If somebody puts a link to a security cam or a nanny cam in their home page or blog, sure, they can expect the world to be looking in!
lol - it would seem to me that they their automated tools are mistaking a slashdotting for an infection.