as i was there standing at the desk waiting for my id to get checked, you know, as i do, given myjob, i ve looked around to see what kind of cameras they were using. conor had been invited to a meeting with civil servants in 2021 to discuss surveillance technology. i immediately spotted a camera on the ceiling which i knew to actually be manufactured by dahua. it never occurred to me that by going to a meeting at the home office, i d actually be able to say, you know, not only are these two critical vulnerabilities, in fact, they can be used on the cameras you have in your lobby. with the gallop of technology, i we are finding ourselves exposed to things that didn t happen in the past. perhaps in the old days you might ve said if you were bugging someone, you had to break in late at night and plant a bug. these days, the target s putting it in for you. the government says it takes.
on surveillance technology. working with the bbc, they designed a series of tests. first, ipvm supplied a hikvision camera to put inside broadcasting house. we have a camera installed in a bbc studio in london, and we are going to hack it remotely using a back door that hikvision built into its own products. panorama couldn t install the camera on a bbc network for security reasons, so it was put on a test network with no firewall and little protection. as a one off experiment, conor and john have agreed to play the role of hackers. they start by locating the camera inside broadcasting house, then attack its security. so all we need to do is plug in the ip address of the target
and copy and paste a string of 13 characters to the end of the address of the device we want to get into. hacking a computer system without permission is a criminal offence, so not all of the details are being shown. having gained access, conor now times how long it takes to get control of the camera. ready, set, go. ok, i m getting the user list. the only user on this device is admin . i m going to set the password to 12345ipvm. and i ve set the password. we re done. 11 seconds. we have access to that camera now. so here, if we zoom in tight on the keyboard, we can see the keys that he s pressing to put his password in for his laptop.