Cheap Web Cams Can Open Permanent, Difficult-To-Spot Backdoors Into Networks

An anonymous reader writes: They might seems small and relatively insignificant, but cheap wireless web cams deployed in houses and offices (and connected to home and office networks) might just be the perfect way in for attackers. Researchers from the Vectra Threat Lab have demonstrated how easy it can be to embed a backdoor into such a web cam, with the goal of proving how IoT devices expand the attack surface of a network. They bought a consumer-grade D-Link WiFi web camera for roughly $30, and cracked it open. After installing a back-door to the Linux system that runs the camera, and then turning off the ability to update the system, they had an innocent seeming but compromised device that could be stealthily added to a network environment.

Comments

Re:You get what you pay for

[WaywardGeek]

Here's a nice warm thought to keep everyone up at night: What is to keep hackers who enjoy this sort of thing from buying devices at BestBuy, hacking them to insert remote back doors, and then returning them to BestBuy the next day? If they put it back in the packaging, possibly with new shrink-wrap, they could claim they never even opened it, and it would go right back on the shelf for some unsuspecting victim to buy.

Would it matter if the device were a $20 webcam, a $2,000 desktop PC, a $50 Wifi router, or a $100 HP printer?