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Owning a Wireless Camera, Its User and Its Network
twistedmoney99 writes "InformIT has posted a two part article by Seth Fogie that describes how a wireless IP camera can be owned and abused. The first part describes how the camera's feed can be sniffed, replaced, or even DoSed off the air by a PDA. The second part then takes a look at the web application interface of the camera (an Axis207W) and exposes numerous vulnerabilities that lead to exposed passwords, a software based DoS, global XSS — and the kicker — a CRSF attack through which an attacker can remotely penetrate the network it is installed on."
I wonder how many people are going to see this and immediately think about that hot girl that lives upstairs?
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
Some IP cameras don't even need to be DoS'd, leave 'em out in the sun for 2 hours and they overheat... in fact, try to pull a stream from them and half the time they overheat. And we're talking about several hundreds of dollars worth of equipment rendered worthless by a bit of sunlight.
And people wonder why adblock is gaining 400k users a month
this site with its multiple pages is one of the reasons
http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=1016102&rl=1
Are we using "owned" to mean "taken control of" in official context now, or is it just me?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Wireless communication reminds me a lot of JavaScript: it's just plain insecure.
With JavaScript, we have to worry about cross-site scripting, easily-thieved JavaScript code, and so many other issues.
It's much the same with wireless networking: we have to be concerned about intercepted transmissions.
So like with JavaScript, a lot of half-assed measures are put in place to try and deal with the inherently insecure nature of the medium. Most of these measures actually fail outright, or at least don't make the situation any better.
With computers still becoming faster at a rapid pace, the wireless encryption policies used today will be easily crackable by a typical PC within two or three years.
Headline News! If you don't secure your wireless network, people can see the traffic on it and spoof responses! I'll concede the camera has a few bugs that should be fixed. But this article doesn't really raise any issues that the average Slashdot reader wouldn't know about.
The article is obviously aimed at a less experienced audience - in which case it really should provide some tips on securing your network, rather than trying to scare people about wireless network technologies.
pwned if you prefer.
It used to be quite a popular activity at school to go into the janitor's closet in the dorms and switch cables around to send cartoons to the security guys in the main building.
While they donut eating lard arses were trying to nominate which fatso would waddle over to change it back, we would nip out of a window to the pub.
I was hoping this was going to be about internet video sex slavery or something:^P
/. since I'm not atwork this weekend anyway.
Hmm... and putting externally available insecure computers on your network makes you vulnerable. I guess that's news to someone. Oh, well I guess I should be doing something other than reading
I can't say I've ever owned a wireless camera or its user.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
On Slashdot, that "hot girl that lives upstairs" is probably going to be their mother... Hell, the best interpretation is that it's their sister.
Deleted
The test camera had a password on "chiapet".
A picture is worth a thousand spambots.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
for a number here, that may be their only chance. Though it may be weird to find out that your mom is a cougar.
Aah, the dreaded Canadian Rope Skipping Federation attack.
You know, it's a little silly to use the word "own" to mean "exploit a vulnerability" when you are speaking in complete sentences, not substituting vaguely similar looking numbers for letters, and generally trying to sound like a grown-up.
sic transit gloria mundi
Seriously, why doesn't every wireless product out there just encrypt its damn signal. It's not as if it is particularly hard to implement and easy to set up an intuitive interface. Joe-shmoe won't understand how to do it? Nonsense, make an automated set-up interface that works over USB , standardise it, and let everyone else implement it as well. That way customers only need to learn how to do it once, and then it should be the same for every product they install. But nooooooooo we can't have any of that. We have to make our own proprietary interfaces, prohibit anyone else from using them, thus resulting in 3 million different products, with customers not being bothered to learn many different interfaces just to use their hardware, and thus you end up having everyone run unsecured networks.
The way it ought to work is when you get a new device you bind it to your home router through a one-click wired interface. Now, just like magic your router can transparently assign keys to every other device you own and afterwards they can all communicate with one another using the router's certificate for authentication. User don't have to know about WEP, WPA, SSL or whatnot, they just plug their webcam into the router's wired interface hit the "bind new device" button and after that it will "just work" with every other device which has been given the router's certificate ( yes, even if the router is shut down afterwards ).
Now, how many people want to bet there will be a bunch of vendors who will oppose this being implemented as an open standard, thus defeating the entire scheme? Me? Cynical? Naaaaaaa...
My German isn't that good either, but as far as I understand it the German page linked to in the summary sounds like it's all a storm in a glass of water around a false positive.
Before deploying these, we ended up disabling the wireless support, and coupling each camera with a Gumstix computer that was serving as both an image buffer and a nicely firewalled configuration that provided much more secure wireless communications.
Mine's across the hallway but it's the same principle.
Lucky she's not a hacker...
I hope.
No sig today...
"pwn" is a "Web 2.0" garbage bastardization.
the proper word is 0wned with a capital zero, at least for those of us with memories of USENET.
("get off my lawn you damn kids!")
And here I was worried that they might use something like Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF).
Good to know we only have Canadians to worry about, eh?
You can get the image. You can DoS the camera. You can impersonate the camera.
Oh boy. What would you like the security camera to show?
How about somebody else, who was previously captured on video?
There are as always ways around this, and one lesson is that cameras (wireless or not) should never be on the same network zone as servers with sensitive data. (as with many other devices, say printers) A simple firewall can take care of most things here by both restricting access to and access from the devices.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So you can push a wireless device off its network. We knew that.
So you can do all kinds of nasty stuff over wireless if the network doesn't use WPA. We knew that.
I own a 207W, but I haven't learned anything new here. If I used it for anything security related I probably would've used Ethernet with Power Over Ethernet. Now I use WPA, and nobody has taken the trouble to sabotage my wireless network yet...
X.
This raises a question that I can't get answered.
I put weather from my backyard on my website. I use it for fun, when I'm at work, or away, I can tell the up-to-the minute weather, and I'd love to put a picture of the backyard up every few minutes. I want to get a wireless camera, but I don't want to pay a fortune, and I'd like it to support wireless.
Can anybody suggest a good camera for this purpose?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Yeah, I heard the Canadian Rope Skipping Federation is a mean bunch of bastards.
OK, the poster is *surprised* that embedded hardware (without the benefit of a decade's internet use, like DNS/DHCP) could be hacked and allow access to the LAN from the wireless?
You're kidding me.
Are there really *THIS* many people who think wireless is as secure as ethernet? This is one of the reasons I'm not building any wireless into my trailer. Do people have to be notified about the insecurity in wireless?
Oh, yeah...Microsoft is part of the sale; of course, they do. Carry on.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov