In fact, Check Point says it tracked similar Iranian targeting of cameras as early as last June during Israel’s last 12-day war with Iran. The head of Israel’s National Cyber Security Directorate, Yossi Karadi, also warned at the time that Iranian hackers were using civilian camera systems to target Israelis and had compromised a street camera in front of the country’s Weizmann Institute of Science before launching a missile attack.
However, the United States and Israeli attacks on Iran and Khamenei’s assassination revealed how well Israel’s own hackers – or potentially its allies, including the US – had penetrated Tehran’s camera systems as well. Israeli intelligence sources speaking to the Financial Times described gathering patterns of Iranian security guards’ lives around Khamenei based on real-time data provided by traffic cameras across the city. “We knew Tehran as well as we knew Jerusalem,” a source told the FT.
The powerful surveillance role of hacked civilian cameras was first evident amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, before the current escalating war in the Middle East. For example, Ukrainian officials warned in January 2024 that Russian forces had hacked two security cameras in the capital of Kyiv to observe Ukrainian infrastructure targets and air defenses. “The aggressor used these cameras to collect data for preparation and adjustment of the attack on Kiev,” a post from Ukraine’s SSU intelligence service reads.
The SSU went so far as to, it writes, somehow disable 10,000 Internet-connected cameras – it did not say how – that could have been used by Russia’s military. “SSU is calling on owners of street webcams to stop broadcasting online from their devices and on citizens to report any streams from such cameras,” the post reads.
Although Ukraine has attempted to stop that spying technology, it also appears to have adopted it. When the Ukrainian military used its own underwater drone to sink a Russian submarine in the Bay of Sevastopol in Crimea, it published video that defense-focused news outlet Military Times noted appeared to have come from a hacked surveillance camera. A BBC report about the Ukrainian hacktivist group One Fist more clearly stated that they were commended by the Ukrainian government for work that included hacking cameras to monitor the movement of Russian content across the Kerch Bridge between Russia and Crimea.
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