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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.
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.
According to TFA, which of course no one has bothered to read:
Shodan crawls the Internet at random looking for IP addresses with open ports. If an open port lacks authentication and streams a video feed, the script takes a snap and moves on. The cameras are vulnerable because they use the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) to share video but have no password authentication in place. The image feed is available to paid Shodan members at images.shodan.io. Free Shodan accounts can also search using the filter "port:554 has_screenshot:true."
Calm yourself and then understand one thing: there is no breaking in going on, here. These cameras are broadcasting this shit directly to all comers, wide open to the world. No one is "tak[ing] a hammer and break[ing] into someone's home," they're standing on the sidewalk looking into the front windows where the home builder didn't bother to install any blinds.
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.
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
I'm afraid I have to agree. This search engine needs to receive as much publicity as possible, not get swept under the rug. Only then, I hope, will the people become aware of how orwellian the IoT really is.
That's actually incorrect. I launched the search engine with the idea of it being used to empirically gather market intelligence ("Netcraft for everything"). And the first search queries that the infosec community ran were for printers. Webcams only came around much later.