A Korean cybersecurity knowledgeable has been sentenced to jail for illegally accessing and distributing personal movies from susceptible “wallpad” cameras in 400,000 personal households.
The 41-year-old man, who has not been formally named, succeeded in remotely accessing 638 condo complexes in South Korea. He exploited over 400,000 good residence units utilized by residents to function their video safety techniques and different home features.
In a posting on a hacking discussion board in November 2021, the person stated he had hacked “a lot of the residences in South Korea” and uploaded 45 images and two movies he had stolen from condo homeowners to show his claims.
The hacker requested 0.1 Bitcoin for video footage from one single day in somebody’s residence.
As information of the information breach unfold, a listing of claimed hacked residences was shared broadly on-line. The hacker’s content material included movies of on a regular basis actions and intimate sexual scenes, prompting individuals to cowl their wallpad cameras, even when their condo complexes weren’t identified to be affected.
In an try to cover his identification, the hacker tried to cowl his digital footprints by utilizing abroad servers to speak with potential purchasers of the personal, sexually-explicit materials.
The hacker was arrested by South Korea’s nationwide police company on the finish of 2022. Investigators seized pc gear and located 213 movies and 400,000 images that had been illegally filmed inside properties by way of hacked wallpad cameras.
In the course of the court docket listening to it was revealed that the identical man had truly given an interview in Feburary 2019, during which he had demonstrated how easy it was to hack into wallpads – describing them as one thing that “center schoolers with primary data of computer systems can simply hack.”
At trial, the person’s protection argued the information leak was to publicise the safety vulnerabilities of the wallpads, however the Uijeongbu District Court docket dominated that argument was not accepted as the person had tried to revenue from the stolen sexual footage.
The person has been ordered to finish a sexual crime prevention program and is prohibited from working in establishments associated to youngsters, youth, and the disabled for 4 years, along with serving a four-year jail sentence.
