UPDATE YOUR FIRMWARE - Wyze Cam flaw lets hackers remotely access your saved videos ( * if they can gain access to your local network/WiFi )

Not really. it’s a wireless camera. you can’t connect it directly to your modem, there needs to be a wireless router in between them. and all home wireless routers have NAT turned on by default. So pretty much everyone was protected, assuming they used a wifi password. Even those with no password on their wifi were only vulnerable to people using their wifi, not the entire internet as a whole.

Back in 2015, it was pretty common for security cameras to have port 23 (telnet) open. Now most of them have gone to port 22 (ssh), which is better, but still, the username and password are hard coded in firmware. This is not seen as a huge security vulnerability, because these ports are not generally forwarded to the devices in question.

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Yet in the absence of Wyze assertively pushing an email message to every customer giving the details and mechanics of the vulnerability, rather than a vaguely worded reference to discontinuing the cam v1 without full disclosure, there might very well be cam v1 owners out there who perhaps knowingly or unknowingly blundered into at-risk territory and are continuing to be deprived of the information and advice they could use to make an informed decision on whether and how to take the necessary steps to protect themselves.

Hence, the continued blowback over what some might perceive as Wyze’s seeming self-serving paternalistic stance of withholding information under a variety of self justifications vs demonstrating the kind of transparency one might hope and expect would be forthcoming from a company the espouses very different values in their public facing marketing claims.

Even if there was justification to assume the risk was infinitely minimal, it would’ve been a great opportunity to do some public education on how to avoid being the victim of such an exploit

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I guess what I meant was if it were able to be serviceable off the internet. If I failed to mention, I apologize, I am not a software engineer so it’s my opinion not fact.

There are routers that are unsecured out there, some have default credentials, exploits, etc…

The WiFi credentials can be hacked locally with some determination then once in the network port forwards could be setup in NAT, etc… Then once locally hacked and the router can have ports open to the internet.

Indeed a long shot but still doable :thinking:

if your router has an exploit that allows people on the WAN side to forward ports to devices on your LAN, that’s a few orders of magnitude more important than a device on your network with an open port.

There is no security when someone has local access. Period.

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Even I’m starting to agree the horse may just be dead. People will either get that it’s serious but not really a big deal for most, or they won’t get it. The lying screaming headlines don’t help though.

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This is the story I’m interested in most.

Out. Of. Proportion.

Bad. Press. Behavior.

Now let me watch the video… :slight_smile:

:ballot_box_with_check:

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Yes, I thanked @Rareapple3 for it in another thread. Finally someone with a level of attention / reputation who gets it.

I’ve only watched a few minutes. Please let us know if he says anything novel (other than pointing out how irresponsible The Verge and Gizmodo and Bleeping Computer - and Wyze- have been about this).

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Well said! As you say it could have, should have, been handled with their highly hyped customer focus as the priority. Apparently I was swayed by the hype and the risk is fairly limited. However, it should always be the customers decision on how to handle their risk.

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Personally, I’d never port forward on a home network using cable/telco hardware. Those magic boxes may not have much security on a port forward. It leaves you open to a kiddie-hacker fest finding an open port. The cams aren’t “exploitable” in any true sense of the word. It’s a pretty useless target and I’m imagining that hackers are looking for a misconfigured router with 80 open on the WAN side or somebody running a web server on their home net. Lot more fun to be had there.
There are a lot more secure ways to connect to a cam or any iot interface if you really need to do that. Or just pass through your cable/telco box and put an endpoint in place that is designed to secure inbound traffic.

As @speadie said, it’s doable but you have way more things to think about than someone looking at more than likely boring cams. Most people probably have carrier, or carrier compatible hardware that has push updates and is not readily accessible from the wan side unless you are the carrier.

But…but. isn’t this just what the legitimate users have been asking for? A way to access the SD card without having to crawl out on the ledge to retrieve the SD card and manage the files.
I’d certainly like to know how this is done.

Those are my same thoughts as I mentioned above:

Nobody from outside the home WiFi could access anything anyway, so yes, as you stated, it is almost exactly what many of us have been asking for them to do on purpose years.

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My impression:
This has the tone, hyperbole, and content of a “hit piece”. The kind of slanted report funded by a competitor (usually via a third-party business that specializes in muckraking).

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Yep, and people see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear. Anyone looking for a reason to be mad at wyze, or afraid of hax0rs will easily find or create it here.

True enough. Cognitive bias is a thing. It also could be the reason why there seems to be a tendency to intensely focus attention on the straw man of risk level instead of the actual unresolved matter of timely and effective disclosure.

The question remains whether adequate measures have been taken to notify all owners of cam v2 and v3 of the specific need to update their firmware due to security concerns in the context of a known vulnerability explained in enough detail to be instructive to those who might not be aware of best practices and to provide the specific reasons why the v1 will remain vulnerable. A vague statement of “use at your own risk” and EoL falls short when a fuller explanation would serve to help the cam owners understand why they are being given that advice and how it benefits them to follow it rather than assume it’s a crass move to churn inventory.

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Hear hear. That is the only indisputably bad step the company took, among several questionable ones.

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You can read the Bitdefender research paper linked in the following reference. It goes into some detail on how it’s done. You will need a cam v1 as those have not and will not receive the firmware update that prevents exploitation of the vulnerability.

https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/labs/vulnerabilities-identified-in-wyze-cam-iot-device/