“Thousands of Security Cameras Online”

On of the most memorable pranks I remember involved accessing a Business Xerox Printer/Server that was online. You could upload your own documents to the printing queue, which would then be printed off automatically by the printer. So we uploaded a few pictures of male buttocks to the printer. And by “a few” I mean a few hundred copies.

Anywho it turns out that that printer was not the only thing online that should not have been: thousands of security cameras are apparently accessible through simple google searches due to lack of foresight by the web administrators. I say lack of foresight as a simple robots.txt file will cause the search crawlers to ignore the sensitive pages being hosted online.

The article refers to one such example, which is found by getting Google to match all pages that have a URL that is created uniquely by a Japanese networked remote camera server system. Click here to see the example in action. It’s a clever way to locate such cameras, and this technique can theoretically be applied to find pretty much anything else as seemingly all device-oriented servers place a common string in their URL.