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Police Bodycams Can Be Hacked To Doctor Footage, Install Malware (boingboing.net)
AmiMoJo shares a report from Boing Boing: Josh Mitchell's Defcon presentation analyzes the security of five popular brands of police bodycams (Vievu, Patrol Eyes, Fire Cam, Digital Ally, and CeeSc) and reveals that they are universally terrible. All the devices use predictable network addresses that can be used to remotely sense and identify the cameras when they switch on. None of the devices use code-signing. Some of the devices can form ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks to bridge in other devices, but they don't authenticate these sign-ons, so you can just connect with a laptop and start raiding the network for accessible filesystems and gank or alter videos, or just drop malware on them.
I hacked the sheriff, but I did not wipe his bodycam... ooo oooo
Need to know if there are any cops around for your illegal business? Don't worry, you can just setup a wifi scanner on your phone to alert you when a cop's camera comes within range! Effective at least a couple hundred meters and probably up to a km!
Government purchase contracts and decision-making has a poor reputation for a reason. This is just yet another example in a very long list.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I find it interesting that important, critical even, systems such as police bodycams and election voting machines in this age appear to have almost an intentional absence of any sort of integrity mechanisms. And can quite literally be manipulated in minutes with next to no effort. These flaws are not complex. They are things that should be picked up by even the technically absent as just looking at the system overviews - no encryption, no signing, ineffective and easily bypassible authentication (if any) as obvious caveats to a resilient system. I just don't buy this as simple and frighting negligence. And where are the pen tests? I call shenanigans!
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Why in the name of FSM are these things WiFi enabled? Why is that circuitry in there?
On, record, download later.
...but seriously, what the ever-living fuck?
I mean, does anyone designing mission-critical shit ever think of this crap? It's not like wireless hacking was invented yesterday.
Maybe police body cams should be recording into an encrypted drive and simultaneously streaming to a drive sealed away in a black box in the cop car for error checking? And have NO ability to adjust the system in any way but with physical contact with some sort of unique dongle that registers infallibly when it's been used.
-Styopa
Officer is on duty. Something royally hits the fan and is captured on bodycam. Within a very short space of time, while still on the scene, the body cam is shut down and stored in an evidence bag. The providence of that evidence is documented and recorded.
From this point onwards the camera is powered off in a sealed tamper proof bag. It is then returned to the station and signed for. The bag is opened and the video is transferred to the storage system. Most likely the camera storage card is then also put into an evidence bag and sealed.
So where does the ability to hack these camera matter? You aren't editing the footage in any way during this window.
Just because a hack is possible doesn't mean there is a usage case for it.
Lets say you upload malware. Who cares. You manage to take out a camera or 2 before they get cleaned. meh.