About a week ago, I stumbled across this post in google reader:
Console Cowboys -I always feel like somebodies watching me.
I read it, I was impressed, and it immediately reminded me of previous work I’ve done. In collaboration with @achillean we scanned the whole internet looking for ddwrt routers with a directory traversal vuln, and wrote a script to step through the findings.The result was a map you could use to find routers based on their mac addresses. The vulnerability was information disclosure of the wan mac address, which likely would have been found by the google street view cars, and the skyhook cars during their sweeps, so if you know the wan mac address of a router, you can translate that to a physical location on a map. I thought this would be perfect to apply the same formula to – except in this case it would be difficult to pinpoint where the camera actually existed unless there was some kind of information disclosure in the video stream itself.
Now let me make this abundantly clear: Nothing is getting recorded or saved. The output here are IMG SRC html links to cameras on the internet. Your browser renders those image streams directly from the cameras. Nothing gets saved or written unless you explicitly choose to save something – kind of like watching television – unless you dvr something or god forbid still own a vcr, in the same manner, you have to choose to record things. That onus is on the viewer.
The author of the console-cowboys blogpost wrote a script to do all the proper API calls against shodan to search for the cameras, then another loop to manually test each result found for the path that shows video. If an HTTP 200 OK was returned for the path, the url was saved.
I took that script, and simply added IMG SRC tags to the output, also adding threading during the checks and one or two small performance tweaks – my second python script ever, and I’m already using threads! (I was kind of proud of this 
)
The results looked something like this. Very simple, but effective:
Each image there is actually video. The cameras each output mjpg straight to the browser, so firefox and chrome were both happy to render video. The trouble was that I found more than 550 cameras – so loading that html into a browser caused my ram and cpu to spike.. a lot. It also wanted 2 megs a second (MEGS, not megabits..) of bandwidth just to view the cameras. So I used the split command to tear the huge list into 6 parts, each list containing 100 cameras, and one with ~56 or so. I posted it off the main website before having writing the script – there were several pastebins floating around with the camera list already, so adding html tags to that was dead easy. I had 200-300 cams in one giant html posted maybe 5 days ago. Everyone had a laugh, and one friend even interacted with one of shops. It was all in good fun for about a week.
Last night I had a member of the information security community raise a concern with me. There was a discussion, and in the end I was berated and called names. As such, I’ve taken down the cam streams from my site. However, I’m absolutely happy to post my script that generated all the cam streams, since its just a updated version of the console-cowboys posting. I encourage you to buy a shodan account like I did, get an API key and have a look at the sort of things people find valuable enough to put on camera. You’d be surprised. Most of it is HORRIFICALLY BORING, but some of the cameras are streaming labs and industrial areas with what appear to be scada devices and other interesting stuff. I’m glad that the girl in the pizza shop had a sense of humor about it, so good on her for that.
I also encourage you to do some research before you buy something like an internet-enabled camera so that you better understand what it is you’re getting yourself into – there’s a chance your camera has not only a ‘known vulnerability’, but a flat out hardcoded backdoor, like these cameras. This is BY DESIGN. Trendnet wrote in a back door.
Anyhow, I was going to use this as material for my LayerOne presentation if my CFP submission got approved but if there are more infosec patrons out there like our generous benefactor here I can expect more headaches the more I talk about this stuff, so I’ll have to think of something else (sorry Noid/Datagram/M).
Now for the meat!
Here’s the script: camcreep.py
You’ll need to install gevent and shodan modules for python. Google can help you with that.
You’ll need a shodan API key: Shodan API key (insert it where it says ‘key =’ .. you’ll see)
I ran this on my mac with 150 threads. It returned about 10,000 results from shodan, and took Just a hair shy of 7 minutes to run.
The script outputs “camlog_new.html”. Thats one giant monolithic file with ALL the cameras. You’ll want to use the linux ‘split’ command to slice it up into various files. I manually added the page links to the bottom of those files since there were only 6 of them.
Also, since I did this all using chrome, I was using “Ultimate Chrome Flag” which is a really neat extension that lets you see some IP GeoData about the site you’re on. If you right click, then open a cam stream in a new tab, you should see the little flag on the right hand side of the URL bar – that will at least tell you what city or major geographic region the camera you’re viewing is in.
Happy Hunting!
