Chinese Cameras Used in Attack

There is an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about the use of cameras made by Dahua Technology Company.  The cameras and video recorders were used to launch a denial of service attack against Brian Krebs, a well-known security writer, who makes a habit of exposing credit card scams, skimmers and other devices or tricks to steal information from us.  Not very many nice people want to see him off-line.

Dahua says it might be a good idea to set strong passwords and update the firmware of their devices, which if you have ever tried to do that, is not as easy as it sounds.  Most of the people who buy these cameras and video recorders have never heard of firmware, or know about the need for software changes.  They are, after all, just cameras that can't do anything but take video of your backyard or basement.  The problem is that they also connect to your home WIFI.

My refrigerator and washing machine want me to connect to my home network too, but we declined.  My security cameras have to be connected and until now I didn't think much about it.  The Chinese have had a series of browsers that sent back all kinds of information to China about the networks home computers attach themselves to.  Now, I wonder about those cameras.  They know my password to the network, which makes it difficult to keep them out of other devices also connected.  The browsers also wanted my hard drive serial number, the names of other routers around me, and my unique identifiers for other devices.  These hackers may have done us a favor in one respect - We need to look more closely at what some of those devices are sending back and storing in Chinese systems.  Besides their intelligence services, there are hackers out there who can have a lot of information about a lot of people if they can hack those stores of information.  If that information is as secure as their cameras and recorders, we are in a lot of trouble.