A man rides his bicycle past residential buildings along a main road as the sun sets in Seoul on Nov 11, 2025. The authorities arrested four people this week in the latest turn in the country's effort to stop exploitative recordings. — AFP
SEOUL, South Korea: South Koreans have long been wary of hidden cameras in public toilets, subway stations and motel rooms. That fear increasingly extends to the cameras in their own homes.
Four people were arrested over the hacking of 120,000 home security cameras in South Korea, whose footage was used to make sexually exploitative material, the National Police Agency said Monday.
It was the latest turn in South Korea’s decade-long battle against the illicit electronic spying that officials say has compromised countless devices that people use in daily life.
The footage came from Internet-connected cameras that were installed in homes, businesses, hospitals, saunas and other spaces, commonly to monitor children or pets. One of the people arrested made about US$12,000 (RM49,500) by selling the footage to a foreign website that shares illegal content, and another made twice as much, police said in a statement.
The hackers, who did not work together, were able to infiltrate the devices easily because they used vulnerable passwords with features like repeated characters or sequential numbers, police said.
Such security cameras are used worldwide, and many have vulnerabilities.
Last year, a security camera firm based in California, Verkada, agreed to pay nearly US$3mil (RM12.38mil) in civil penalties to settle a US Justice Department lawsuit over a breach of about 150,000 of its cameras inside places such as hospitals and schools in 2021.
Videos stolen from tens of thousands of security cameras in China were sold on social media. Groups backed by Iran have tried to spy on Israel through private security cameras, prompting Israeli authorities to issue guidance for residents to change passwords and install software updates.
For more than a decade, South Korea has grappled with hidden cameras being used to make sexually explicit videos, mostly of young women. From 2011 to 2022, police made nearly 50,000 arrests over the use of cameras to create sexually explicit material.
Some of the earliest news reports that sexually explicit material was being extracted from security cameras were in 2017, said Hakkyong Kim, a professor of police science at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul.
“It’s not a new crime,” he said, “and the damage will only get worse.”
The suspects in the case announced Monday were charged with violating laws against hacking, the head of the National Police Agency’s Cyber Terror Investigation Unit, Kim Young-woon, said in an interview. Three suspects, who remain in custody, face additional charges of creating or selling sexually exploitative material, some involving children, he said. The fourth suspect was released after being arrested.
The number of victims is anyone’s guess, Kim said, adding that the website where the illicit videos were shared was also under investigation.
Authorities did not disclose the origin of the cameras that had been hacked, or their manufacturers.
Last year, South Korea’s Science Ministry, communications authorities and National Police Agency said that many of the videos extracted from home cameras had been shared on Chinese sites. The ministry said that products ordered directly from overseas, many from China, were likely to have security flaws because they don’t meet local regulations.
The Science Ministry said Tuesday that it was reviewing proposed regulatory changes that would block home cameras from working unless the user sets a complex username and password.
“If a camera doesn’t require the user to change the password, it’s a fundamental flaw in the product,” said Sangjin Lee, a cybersecurity professor at Korea University in Seoul. He added users often leave in place the default password when they purchase a new device, even though it could be dangerously simple for a hacker to guess. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
