South Korea removed 1,300 cameras from its military bases after discovering they're designed to feed back to a Chinese server

Don't DM, reply so we may spread the word.

I'm really surprised that military in such a technologically advanced country just connected random IP cams to the internet

Reolink, amcrest. Amcrest dont get anything starting with ASH in the model name.

If you want ONVIF, be sure to check the specs, many cheaper models drop support, but not all.

Some YI cameras have easily replaced firmware and can do rtsp too, but you have to do your homework on those models to be sure you're getting one that can be modded.

You'll still want to (IMO) toss any of them in a vlan without internet access, and rather than provide that vlan access to an NVR on another vlan, I'd lean toward your NVR having a second connection to that vlan. I'm a huge fan of segmentation though, so YMMV.

Same with russian 'grandma phones' with big buttons. Some researches found thst although they don't provide any functionality besides basic phone\sms stuff, they do try to call their motherbase, sending all credentials and geoloc. IIRC there was no argument about them sending the content of smses and voicecalls, but it's troubling as it is.

+ Russian as in sold there, they are chinese, sometimes with a local branding.

Ubiquiti G3 and G4 cams do rtsp direct streams without needing Unifi Protect services on a unifi gateway device. G5 requires unifi prot but can rtsp from the protec gateway.

Just get some raspberry pi camera.

What to do about IR vision though?

Not a plug and play solution. But if you aren't averse to tinkering. RPI zero with a CSI camera and v4lrtsp server. can get you done rather cheap. Depending on your needs.

Like every military operation, the job always goes to the lowest bidder, that is still overpriced, because it's just tax money. That's what always cracks me up about stuff that is marketed as military grade.

Capitalism. They just bought the cheapest reliable enough option they could find and didn't give two craps about infosec, because that's too expensive to actually properly do. Minimize the financial losses of an upfront purchase. (I worked more than enough jobs in hardware design to know what management cares about and what it doesn't)

Also, big yikes for the Israel flag in your username.

Suppliers lie.

I know a guy who is the sole reason that software written by <adversary> isnt being currently used in <host countries most top secret defense environment>. His boss told him to lie if asked, and he refused to and informed <end user>.

Cheap devices

I remember when, I think, Sony was hacked because of the movie « the interview ». It created enough of a news cycle shitstorm that our corporate overlords became excessively generous with our infosec budget and made it a tier 1 priority.

It went for measly .5% to a whooping 25% of IT expenditure.

On the other hand to really show they didn't understand anything about it they recruited an experienced CISO and fired him a month later because an accountant's workstation was hit by a ransomware. The guy barely had the time to start building a plan and launch a bunch of audit but still got the full blame for decades of neglects. (He eventually sued them and settled).

Whether you like it or not

Yes Jeff, I know they are cheap as shit, you cheapskate

Remind me again why you'd want an Apple (made in China) or OnePlus (made in China) or any of the other 70% of all cell phones available in the US? Are you just a big fan of paying extra for the same technology?

Or are you more wedded to phones made in Malaysia, India, or Vietnam for some peculiar reason?

you don’t put the cheapest solution in place

No shortage of high end Huawei models. They've been competitive with Samsung for nearly a decade.

nothing to see here :)

This is just bad spy craft. You don't tell the person who bugged you that you found their bug. You mess with their head by setting up false flags.

Like have maps of China and what look like troop movements.

Or details about tank man.

Why not have the cameras on a VLAN that has no Internet access?

Just use a system that connects to a server on base and nothing else

I wonder if this was the case. From the bloomberg article,

"No data has actually been leaked," they added.

And from Yonhap,

found to be designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally

So maybe they were designed that way, but it didn't work because the cam network was offline?

Keep in mind that this was on the border with North Korea, so, they'd (the South Korean military) have a very high level of paranoia on being hacked to begin with.

Share the URL if you find out it does

Well, they did remove it when they found out. But....

Look. I'm looking at a Thinkpad. Lenovo owns that line now. I dunno if they can push firmware updates to old, pre-Lenovo models, but they can to current versions. Those things are pretty common in a business setting. AFAIK, the US has never raised any issues with Lenovo and security a la Huawei. But if there was an honest-to-God, knock-down, drag-out war, I assume that Beijing is gonna see whether it can leverage anything like that. And I've got, what...a microphone? A camera? Network access? Maybe interesting credentials or other things in memory or on my drive? I mean, there are probably things that you could do with that.

Then think of all the personal phones that military people have. Microphone. Camera. Network access and radio. Big fat firmware layer.

My guess is that if you did a really serious audit of even pretty secure environments, you'd find a lot of stuff floating around that's potentially exploitable, just due to firmware updates. If you exclude firmware updates, then you're vulnerable to holes that haven't been patched.

Okay, maybe, for some countries, you can use all domestic manufacturers. I don't think that South Korea could do that. Maybe the US or China could. But even there, I bet that there are supply chain attacks. I was reading a while back about some guy selling counterfeit Cisco hardware. He set up a bunch of bogus vendors on Amazon. His stuff got into even distribution channels with authorized Cisco partners, made it into US military networks.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/counterfeit-cisco-gear-ended-up-in-us-military-bases-used-in-combat-operations/

Counterfeit Cisco gear ended up in US military bases, used in combat operations

That guy was just trying to make a buck, though I dunno if I'd have trusted his products. But you gotta figure that if that could have happened, there's room for intelligence agencies to make moves in that space. And that's the US, which I bet is probably the country most-able to avoid that. Imagine if you're a much smaller country, need to pull product from somewhere abroad.