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IoT Security Is So Bad, There's a Search Engine For Sleeping Kids (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams. The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores. While IoT manufacturers are to blame, this also highlights the creepy stuff you can do with Shodan these days. At the start of January, Check Point recommended companies to block Shodan's crawlers. The infosec community came to defend Shodan, and even its founder said that Shodan is uselessly branded as a tool of evil, saying that attackers have their own scanning tools.
These are some of the same terrified idiots who support things like the TSA and NSA spying. You know, to win the war against terror...
Now that the FBI's kiddie porn site got shutdown, that task-force needed a new project that exploits children.
I'm not a member of the site, but I don't think it's specifically for certain types of images as far as I can tell.
This must not be an article about ad-blockers.
Security is hard and companies have to make their video surveillance products easy enough for a socker mom to install. Frankly I'm not surprised. Nor do I have a solution. As someone who has to provide tech support to family and friends I realize how hard it is to "just make it work" for those who couldn't care less about the technical details.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
If I were to create a device that can be hacked by someone else, then my customers and I are to blame for the act of someone hacking it?
If I were to create a service to freely see inside said devices, thus enabling people to eavesdrop (which is illegal in most states!), then I am not to blame?
People who don't secure their systems and devices are to blame for someone breaking into them? Go fuck yourself, if that's how fucking much of a dick you are for believing that shit. And here's why:
Anyone can take a hammer and break into someone's home. I don't see anyone blaming architects, glass blowers, window manufactuers, installers, washers, etc., or the owner of the property, for the fact that glass can be broken by a hammer. I don't see anyone blaming Craftsman for making said hammer. Nor do I see anyone blaming automobile manufactuers for the vehicle the burglar drove. Nor do I see anyone blaming the textile factories for making the ski mask he wore.
But, we have no problem blaming software and hardware developers and their companies for making an insecure system we put our stuff into, and EXPECT them to secure it? That's like saying all you need is a lock and key on your front door, and your home is secure.
Again, do we blame the company who create the door? The doorknob?
No, we blame the person who broke in. Therefore... this constant B.S. articles like this, where we blame device manufacturers, for making cameras insecure and shit, is a complete and total jab at the wrong problem. The problem is simple: the people perpetrating these acts. And fucking researchers doing it. And the businesses giving them a direct path to it.
You can be sure if a business offered home invasion robbery instruction manuals they'd be on their sorry ass and in jail real fucking quick.
The infosec community came to defend Shodan, and even its founder said that Shodan is uselessly branded as a tool of evil, saying that attackers have their own scanning tools.
It won't matter to the families of the children you have exposed that other scanning tools are available. Yours is public and visible --- and it has a deliberately provocative name. You can't search Google for Shodan and miss the connection.
I'm not sure if everyone already knew this but Shodan *started* as an non-secured webcam search engine back in 2009.
Kriston
The feds will shut down the sleeping-kids search engine in a couple of weeks, after they infect a bunch of computers with phone-home-ware.
What's that you say? I'm posting in the wrong thread? Sorry, saw "kids" and "cameras" and "creepy" and they sort of blended together there for a minute.
Strange but true: My captcha is warrants. Now THAT is creepy!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
An AC wrote:
There was no breaking in.
If you provide data to the public Internet without any form of restriction, you can't then validly complain when the Internet public sees that data. You offered it publicly, and the public took you up on your offer.
This isn't anything like breaking and entering, nor even like someone walking through a door which you left wide open. It's much more intentional on your part than that:-- you offered data to the public by creating an unrestricted access port on the Internet, your offer was accepted when someone opened that port, and then you deliberately sent your data out to that recipient. It was your choice, before and after you made the offer to the public. Nobody can force you to send your data if you don't want to. Your system wasn't hacked to change its code to something that you did not intend.
The closest analogy I can make is to imagine yourself standing on the sidewalk in the high street, an open sweet jar in one hand, and the other hand outstretched offering sweets to passers by. The highstreet is the public Internet, and your invitingly outstretched hand is the open port. If someone takes hold of the sweet, you can still prevent it from being taken by holding tightly onto the wrapper (an access restriction, perhaps you want to check that recipients are smiling first).
But if you first offer a sweet and then release it, you don't get to complain --- it was your visible intention to hand out sweets to passers by, and nobody can read your mind, only your actions. If you don't understand this then perhaps you don't grasp how Internet protocols work, and you would be best advised to stay well clear of the Internet.
You may wish that Internet protocols worked some other way, perhaps using ESP, but they don't. They work as they were defined.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
...front gardens, back gardens...
Aha! But not side gardens! Those have better privacy...
Because sweeping this under the rug means bad guys won't ever attack these devices. *rolls eyes* Their point won't have been made until these *groan* IoT *groan* device making shitheads secure their crapware.
The geek makes this argument whenever one of his pet "white hat" hacking projects is clearly open to abuse.
The problem here is that the argument appeals only to other geeks --- not to those who see only an invasion of privacy made possible --- made easier --- by a search engine like Shodan. That a door was unlocked or the lock was broken does not imply a right to enter.
The geek needs to learn that others see him as the shithead whether he is wearing the white hat or the black.
Like electricians who need a license to work (atleast where I live), IoT devices should require a license to install.
...they they don't need to worry about the surveillance.
And the parents who put these protections in place, that's just like our big brother the NSA and GCHQ putting protections in place for us. No encryption necessary. Hope no bad guys get a hold of this.
But if you're doing nothing wrong... ...you have no reason to worry.
E
It is as the IoT people never even have heard of the, by now, 30+ years of history of Internet security fails. These must be the dumbest, most arrogant and most clueless developers, lead by managers of the same quality. It is high time that we get legally actionable gross negligence for manufacturers that ignore Internet security best practices.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
.io domains are british, so I just concluded that 99% of the pedophiles are living there. (UK includes US too... it's like... a big transcontinental isle full of shitty people anyways)
"Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors."
'I am the Calvery' criteria for Secure by Design includes some good stuff, but to compensate then says:
All GPIO, UART, and JTAG interfaces on the hardware should be disabled for production versions.
I'm not sure what their threat model is for a consumer device.
Are they worried about somebody in the supply chain compromising the device?
It seems like the first thing for putting a camera on the Internet is to give it a strong, unique password out of the box and not have any bugs that let folks in in other ways. The above might be useful for hiding any such bugs, but ultimately it seems like security thru obscurity. Just put really simple s/w in the camera that has a good chance of being safe, provide the above debug interfaces, and provide a bug bounty.
If the Calvery wanted to fix this, they could publish open source camera s/w with the above bug bounty. Then the race to the bottom vendors would not have to sacrifice security fro cost.
IoT: Internet of Trouble
Lets see....cheaply-made products produced and sold with barely a nod to security, installed by users who are likely to be as clueless as they could possibly be, all connected to a worldwide network easily accessible by lots and lots and lots and lots of malicious people with too much time on their hands.
What could possibly go wrong??
Trust me, you ain't seen nothin' yet. I'd wager that 98% of all of these consumer-grade gadgets are going to be easily hackable in their default configuration. It's only a matter of time- eventually one of them will cause a serious injury or death, or at the very least some kind of significant property damage.
You want your refrigerator to be internet enabled? Great! But should it also have the unfettered ability to turn the temperature down and spoil all the food?
You want door locks you can control from the other side of the world? Great! But should any Joe Blow with a free hacking kit be able to unlock your doors at will?
You want to be able to remotely turn on your stove and start heating some water? Great! But should it blindly start "heating" a cardboard box left sitting on the burner because some dickhead in Moldavia can bypass your login?
You want an internet-enabled thermostat? Great! But should some malicious asshole be able to turn off your heat in the dead of winter when you're on vacation, freezing your house and causing your water pipes to burst?
Don't get me wrong- I think the overall idea of IoT is fascinating and holds great promise, but mark my words... like anything else it's gonna be abused too. Unfortunately I think it's going to take some major-league lawsuits before manufacturers start taking the security aspect of it seriously.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Internet traffic on the Vatican City grew 500% in 15 minutes.