Russia and Ukraine are hacking surveillance cameras to look for strike targets, WSJ reports

Russia and Ukraine are hacking surveillance cameras to look for strike targets, WSJ reports

Internet-connected cameras have become an intelligence tool for Russia and Ukraine: both sides hack them to watch the enemy, choose targets, and check the results of strikes, The Wall Street Journal writes. According to the outlet, artificial intelligence has made it easier both to hack such devices and to analyze the video obtained.

For example, in late 2022, Team OneFist, an international group of hackers helping Ukraine, gained control of a camera on a tall building in Sevastopol. With it, the hackers watched Russian ships, submarines, and helicopters, and after tracking one of the helicopters, discovered an air base near the local airport that they had not known about. The data was passed to the Ukrainian military, and soon afterward it struck the base, damaging aircraft and air defense systems.

Russian hackers, meanwhile, took control in 2024 of cameras in residential buildings in Kyiv, including one that residents had installed to monitor their neighborhood. The SBU said Russia planned to use these streams to look for targets in the capital and adjust missile strikes.

🔵According to the service, after the start of the full-scale war it identified about 40,000 potentially dangerous cameras; as the WSJ writes, they were secured, turned away, or blocked. In July, Dutch intelligence warned that Russian government structures were also hacking cameras across Europe, gathering information about military transport and weapons deliveries to Ukraine, the WSJ notes.

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