Let’s Broadcast to the World!
Who's watching you?
Some time ago, I got interested in these tiny little cams with direct Ethernet connection, that contain a lightweight webserver that streams the actual picture to the network the cam’s connected to. I was holding such a cam in the hands at work, some while ago, and recently I was wondering myself, how expensive these would actually be. Not that I would really want to purchase one, just for informing myself. So, I opened Google and entered the manufactures name followed by some other keywords. The first links Google showed me were the links to the actual products, but while flying over Google’s first page of results I found some link directed to an IP address and ending with an .shtml file. The structure of the URL looked similar like the one I’ve seen from the cams we have at work… call it boredom, but I followed the link and – I was surprised – I landed on such a cam’s video server which streamed me the picture of the traffic on some highway. I got the idea to enter the site’s title into Google and search for more links similar to this one. And what should I say… after around one hour of search I’ve already found seven sites containing the live-pictures of webcams which in my opinion seem not to be intended for public-viewing. Or at least, I don’t know why someone should want the internet to watch his bar’s guests or his co-workers to be visible on the world wide web.
I’m really astonished about some administrator’s sloppiness on such things. Especially, because it’s not them who are visible on the internet, but the people around them. On some webcams I really got the impression, that the administrators of these webcams thought, that it would be good for them to be able to access the webcams from anywhere, and to make this possible just use “security by obscurity”. The webcams where all only accessible directly by entering the server’s (or gateway’s, dunno) IP-address and had no security at all, for accessing the live-stream.
However, I think, I kinda found some new hobby for long nights. And you should think twice when you see a camera connected to the network somewhere – you might be visible to the whole internet. Oh, this reminds me of the local Subway, where three cameras are hanging in the corners, but no sign indicates that the place is getting filmed. Hm…