Google has also indexed thousands of publicly accessible Panasonic webcams

http://tlrobinson.net/projects/bigbrother/

by tlrobinson • 13 years ago

183 59 13 years ago

tlrobinson.net

These appear to mostly be in China.

I haven't updated the list of cameras in awhile (and I seem to have lost my script to do it)

achillean• 13 years ago

This is a similar website that gathered webcam data using Shodan (http://www.shodanhq.com):

http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/

Nux• 13 years ago

lol, someone's taking an exam http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=36739

awesome resource, connects you to the world in a weird way :)

rafaelm• 13 years ago

Heh, that's an IP from Chile. Looks like some sort of outdoors classroom or something.

icebraining• 13 years ago

This is funny: a dog hotel: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=166

davidtyleryork• 13 years ago

So this has actually been a pretty common 4chan prank for a while now. People give you instructions for Googling webcam IP addresses (very typically just an IP string or something similar) and then try to find something worth sharing. Just like the printer post above, it's incredible how many webcams are left completely unsecured.

eli2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty confident this actually predates the founding of 4chan. I mean, it's not rocket science: if there is a device that can be administered via the web, then you can probably find at least a couple unsecured via a web search.

vasco• 13 years ago

What you wouldn't have though is a large group of people dedicated to actively monitor what is being captured.

cynwoody• 13 years ago

>Just like the printer post above, it's incredible how many webcams are left completely unsecured.

My guess is that making a webcam publicly accessible is more likely to be intentional than doing the same with a printer.

Of course, if the webcam is for security, then probably not. But people installing security cams should be expected to know what they are doing (LOL!).

OGC• 13 years ago

Also on German krautchan. Watching some japanse gas station attendant receiving weird stuff via fax was hilarious.

kaybe2• 13 years ago

I know I probably shouldn't ask, but did you tape it?

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

I haven't updated the list of cameras in a few years, and seem to have lost my script to do it. I'll see what I can do later.

bane2• 13 years ago

For fun, I used to troll open webcams in Japan. The best were the ones you can pan around and zoom in and out of. Lots of nice vistas, sea ports, city scenes. I'd put them on in the background and provide some visual "noise" during the day.

kaybe2• 13 years ago

But those are intended to be public, are they not?

bane2• 13 years ago

I don't think so. They seem more like security cams or similar. Plus being able to pan and zoom them around makes me think they really aren't meant for more than the person who set them up.

schabernakk• 13 years ago

if you can find those cams via a google search, doesn't that mean they are linked from some other public site (which has also been indexed) which would indicate they were left public intentionally (at least most of them)?

If I would set up a web-accessible cam without password protection, how would google find it? Its a crawler right? It doesnt just searches for random IPs and tries to connect to them.

I always was under the assumption that there is a pretty big part of the internet which is just not indexed by the major search engines (thus more or less private).

0x06• 13 years ago

Google is amazingly good at digging up sites out of nowhere. I wonder if it is a combination of URLs passing through Chrome, GMail, any android phone, and so on. It's always a hassle keeping staging/dev sites out of the index if you're not careful with all the right meta noindex and robots.txt tags. (robots.txt with disallow all, on its own, won't keep sites/URLs from showing up in the results, at best just hide the cached body text summary below the link)

diminoten3• 13 years ago

> I wonder if it is a combination of URLs passing through Chrome, GMail, any android phone, and so on.

That would be incredibly alarming, and quite possibly the largest breach of trust perpetrated by a company so far this decade.

to3m• 13 years ago

People sometimes leave their site logs public, which I suspect means google could find links to private pages in the referer logs.

(Of course, people should be relying on more than obscurity to hide their private pages! - but I believe people have been known to make mistakes and/or not know what they're doing.)

pavel_lishin• 13 years ago

Some IRC networks or channels make their logs publicly accessible - so if you're showing off your parakeet on camera one day, that URL might be logged.

stickydink• 13 years ago

This might raise a few eyebrows...

http://bit.ly/V4VtJJ

hippich• 13 years ago

So many wasted IPv4s...

dfamorato• 13 years ago

There is actually a crawler for "Machines and Devices", such as routers, IP Phones, WebCams, Dell Dracs, HP ILO , VMWARE ESX and so on.

http://www.shodanhq.com/browse

Also, check your server ip on Shodan to see if your firewall rules are not exposing a little to much

wyck• 13 years ago

This was news about 6 years ago.

brd• 13 years ago

In school I had done a little research project to see if there were opportunities to map out these cameras and use them for disaster response scenarios. It seemed like a promising approach but I don't believe my prof ever took it past my proof of concept.

We were even able to track down some cameras located on campus which made for some hilarious phone calls.

Ao7bei3s• 13 years ago

How?

smallegan• 13 years ago

Clearly wasn't made for the frontpage of HN, it'd be nicer if it polled them server side, cached them and then reserved it up refreshing it every so often for the previews.

franze• 13 years ago

ok, i just googled

https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22viewerframe%3Fmod...

10 600 results

when you click on one result

i.e.: 202.212.193.26:555/CgiStart?page=Single&Mode=Motion&Language=0

then you see in the head of the frameset (and similar in every framed html document)

  <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="none">
  <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">
  <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noarchive">

so basically, these HTML abominations should not get indexed if google would follow these indexing directives (basically google invented these meta tags themselves)

google is evil? nope - they really follow these directives.

so why is this indexed?

take a look at

http://202.212.193.26:555/robots.txt

  User-Agent: * 
  Disallow: /

the robots.txt is a crawling directive, google can't crawl the (current) version of these pages, so google doesn't see the indexing directive. but as crawling is optional for indexing URLs, this gets indexed.

how could this be solved, well: either get rid of the robots.txt or

  User-Agent: * 
  Disallow: /
  Noindex: /

the noindex robots.txt directive is specified nowhere, but it works nonetheless.

MiguelHudnandez9• 13 years ago

Can you elaborate on how crawling is optional for indexing? Isn't crawling a prerequisite to indexing?

The only exceptions I can think of are scary, like operating a caching proxy and scraping the cached data. Or scraping data from browsers that have loaded pages by user request.

nostrademons2• 13 years ago

You can discover a URL through finding a link to it on a publicly-accessible web page, even if crawling that link itself is not possible.

scoot• 13 years ago

"ok, i just googled [...] 10 600 results"

Most of which, to be fair, seem to be descriptions of this exploit, or pages listing open cams. The number of cams actually accessible is a fraction of those, and the number unintentionally left open a smaller fraction again.

uptown• 13 years ago

Looks like Heisenberg is ready to cook:

http://207.68.47.143:8080/anony/mjpg.cgi

mr337• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree more

NathanKP• 13 years ago

While we are on the topic of Google indexing things and revealing security holes I think that VoIP devices should also be mentioned.

I remember when I was taking a network security class in college the professor was guiding us through the steps required to scan a network for vulnerabilities, specifically detecting services and control panels which are left open and vulnerable. Naturally we were using the college network for this, and in addition to the expected control panels of printers in different professors' offices I accidentally found the control panel for the school VoIP system, and it was not properly secured. I believe it was a Cisco system. Anyway the control panel seemed to offer access to modify various settings of the college VoIP phone system, with no password protection.

Now granted it could be that I only had access to this because I was doing the scan from "inside the system" instead of outside via the web, but I'm sure there are vulnerable VoIP systems which have accidentally exposed their control panels to the internet.

gizmo6862• 13 years ago

>Now granted it could be that I only had access to this because I was doing the scan from "inside the system" instead of outside via the web

If 'inside the system' means from a University internet connection, that it is very much a security hole, as anyone physiclly present could exploit it. (Or at best any person who the Univeristy allows on their network, which is much larger than the group of people who should be able to touch those settings)

kvasan• 13 years ago

So anyone want to take on the challenge of building a "Person of Interest" like system and hook it up to these publicly accessible cams, it would obviously be less early-warning as its fictionally one. Maybe I would try it but I assume the computing resources needed would be large, but wouldn’t a bot-net solve that. Or maybe my first brush of ML experience has left me naive of its capability’s.

Of course a 'Global Citizen Operative' would have to take action also, it is not like I proposed a "Global responsive network of autonomous drone to enforce peace and harmony" to would do that instead.

Sorry for the up in the clouds comment but the merciless hand of insomnia grabbed me and prompted my mind to wander.

Google has also indexed thousands of publicly accessible Panasonic webcams

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