Posted on 10/11/2026 11:43:21 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The highly vulnerable devices have turned into tools for combatants to track, surveil and attack the enemy
As U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran early this year, a poultry farmer in northern Israel decided to check on his chickens. When he launched the app on his phone for the webcam outside his coop, he was alarmed to see that its language had been switched to Arabic. He contacted Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, which found that hackers had taken control of the Chinese-made camera.
They weren’t interested in chickens. The camera’s orientation on the coop offered it a line of sight to the movements of Israeli security forces along the nearby border with Lebanon. The cyber directorate said it helped the farmer harden the camera’s security and adjust its viewing angle to stop capturing military operations.
The farmer’s webcam was one of an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras worldwide, according to cybersecurity consultants S-RM. The devices have become a background fixture of daily life in the form of security systems, doorbells, traffic controls and even baby monitors—and potentially any of them are vulnerable to snooping, say cybersecurity experts and hackers.
“We are now seeing the conversion of civilian surveillance into wartime intelligence collection,” said Alexander Leslie, a national-security expert at threat-intelligence consultants Recorded Future, who sees a global “soft underbelly” in omnipresent digital eyeballs.
The Wall...
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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> hackers had taken control of the Chinese-made camera <
But the Chinese-made camera was cheaper than one made elsewhere. And that’s all that matters.
Right?
🤔
Corollary to Murphy’s Law: “Everything that can be hacked, will be hacked. And EVERYTHING can be hacked.”
And the American company making American electronic products sourced their parts from Chyna. NAFTA has consequences.
bump
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