Photo: Martin Bureau (Getty Images)
A hacker group claims to have recently broken into the networks of cloud-based surveillance firm Verkada, a Silicon Valley startup that sells and manages security systems to thousands of organizations across the country.
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Once inside the firm’s walls, the hackers were able to use its 150,000 live camera feeds to peer into the internal workings of countless organizations, including medical facilities, psychiatric hospitals, jails, schools and police departments, and even large companies like Tesla, Equinox and Cloudflare, according to a report from Bloomberg. The scope of the hack appears massive.
The hackers claim to have downloaded large amounts of data and to have witnessed private, confidential incidents that had transpired “behind closed doors” in the many institutions on which they spied.
While the hack doesn't pose the kind of national security threat as the more sophisticated SolarWinds campaign, it can be an existential threat for victims who didn't install the patch in time.
Read more about White House says closely following Microsoft email breach by China hackers on Business Standard. The US government said it is closely following the breach of a Microsoft email application reportedly carried out by Chinese hackers, calling it an "active threat" with a "large number" of victims.