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!

Comments

Daycares with cams

[FerretFrottage]

While looking ofr daycare for my kids, I came across a few that offered web based cam viewing of the kids/classrooms. My wife thought it was a great idea til I suggested that anyone could potentially view the kids....sex offenders, children theft services, etc. Sure the school offered password based access, but any system that is turned on can be compromised. 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.

Perhaps some places have policies where the camera is on only for certain periods of time that vary weekly and IT departments that verify access logs, but I saw no such plans when I checked.

Welcome to last October

[dq5 studios]

Johnny at IHackStuff has a huge list of fun things like this you can get from google.
Here is the list of searches for network aware stuff: Google Cached since main site is down
Some search phrases for cameras are: "camera linksys inurl:main.cgi" and
"powered by webcamXP" "Pro|Broadcast"

Don't forget that google can limit results to region by using "site:.jp" or similar.

Re:search keyword - find the most interesting plac

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

I win:

http://63.243.46.98:8081/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi ...

robots.txt not obvious

[Animaether]

It's not really obvious.

If you don't want your webserver to be 'found' then either :
A. don't put it online. (Right)
B. security through obscurity: don't link to it, don't save a record of it. No links = no crawling/spidering.
C. Put it behind a server-wise password

Because in the end, Google may respect robots.txt but I, for one, don't when creating a local cache of a site using HTTrack .
And I'd imagine there's search engines which ignore it just as well.

Re:The best ones so far

[asreal]

Austin International Airport Security:

http://lobbycamera4.abia.org/axis-cgi/mjpg/video .c gi?camera=&resolution=640x480

Good reason to make security cams public..

[slashmojo]

Its not such a bad idea to make security cameras publicly viewable (although allowing the public to conrtol them is another matter) for example it essentially gives you a whole world full of witnesses to whatever events may happen..

Lets say your local friendly 'protection' dude wanders in to your shop one day asking for money 'or else'.. you can either..

a) inform him that his every move is being watched by a million slashdotters..

b) pull your gun out from under the counter and blow his brains out - then tell the police there's plenty of witnesses to interview.. ;)

Google stopped me

[future assassin]

If I use inurl:"webcam/index.php evantually I get this message from Google Thsi only happens with the above text using .php and not inurl:/view/index.shtml With .shtml I can search forever.

Google Error We're sorry... ... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected. We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.