A Korean cybersecurity professional has been sentenced to jail for illegally accessing and distributing non-public movies from weak “wallpad” cameras in 400,000 non-public households.
The 41-year-old man, who has not been formally named, succeeded in remotely accessing 638 residence complexes in South Korea. He exploited over 400,000 sensible house gadgets utilized by residents to function their video safety programs and different home features.
In a posting on a hacking discussion board in November 2021, the person mentioned he had hacked “many of the residences in South Korea” and uploaded 45 images and two movies he had stolen from residence homeowners to show his claims.
The hacker requested 0.1 Bitcoin for video footage from one single day in somebody’s house.
As information of the information breach unfold, an inventory 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 folks to cowl their wallpad cameras, even when their residence complexes weren’t recognized to be affected.
In an try to cover his id, the hacker tried to cowl his digital footprints by utilizing abroad servers to speak with potential purchasers of the non-public, 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 hacked wallpad cameras.
In the course of the court docket listening to it was revealed that the identical man had really given an interview in Feburary 2019, wherein 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 Courtroom 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.
