Bengaluru CCTVs hacked: Criminals using open data to rob, blackmail

The Karnataka government recently announced that they are going to install 5,000 new CCTV cameras throughout the city if Bengaluru. The ones that are already there in the city seem to be under constant hacking threats.

Cyber security experts have claimed that data from the existing internet-connected cameras are being hacked. This theft has been happening for quite some time now and the police and the government should act accordingly.

Bengaluru, which is the IT hub of India, has grown rapidly in the last 10 years. The city is filled with smart people. Such people ideally invest their ideas in a better place other than hacking CCTV cameras across the city.

Also read: Here are the passwords you should not be using.

No matter how smart the city has become and no matter how smart the hackers are, police cannot continue allowing this theft of government data and particularly CCTV hacking.

The experts have claimed that this is happening regularly because of the weak passwords. Through these passwords the hacker can get his/her access into the CCTV footage and ten use it to facilitate a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This happens when a large amount of that data is sent from the Digital Video Recorder to the target server.

The founder of the National Anti-Hacking Group, Lieutenant Vineet Kumar, even went to the police seeking help to stop these hackers. The police are yet to act on this issue.

However, Bengaluru police commissioner, Praveen Sood has gone on to claim that their CCTV cameras are pretty powerful and they cannot be hacked as they have several levels of protection.

We can only hope that the hackers are not reading this statement from the commissioner. They might just come up with a fresh challenge for the city police.

• CCTV cameras Bengaluru
• Bengaluru Police
• hackers of Bengaluru