A number of Chinese media outlets today reported that security cameras at a Tesla factory in China had been hacked, sparking widespread discussion.
According to ifeng.com, a group of hackers watched live and archived surveillance footage from hundreds of businesses, including Tesla and software provider Cloudflare, by gaining access to the camera management of security systems startup Verkada.
The report said one of the videos was taken from inside Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory and workers on the assembly line were seen.
But Tesla China said on Wednesday that the incident involved only one Tesla supplier’s production site in central China’s Henan province and that the networking of those cameras had been stopped.
Neither the Shanghai Gigafactory nor the stores in China use Verkada’s cameras, and other camera equipment is connected to the company’s internal network rather than the Internet, Sina Tech cited Tesla China as saying.
Swiss software developer Tillie Kottmann recently shared screenshots of surveillance video from Tesla’s warehouse in California and surveillance video from an Alabama prison on Twitter.
Verkada acknowledged the intrusion and said it had disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent unauthorized access.
Verkada CEO Philip Kaliszan said in 2018 that Verkada intended to make it easy for an organization’s many users to watch live video and share it securely, for example, with emergency responders.
Verkada received $139 million in venture capital, with funding announced a year ago valuing the Silicon Valley startup at $1.6 billion.
(Source: ifeng.com)
