Spanish
Four South Koreans have been arrested in connection with the hacking of approximately 120,000 surveillance cameras in homes and businesses, sources from the investigation confirmed to EFE this Thursday, which has revealed that part of the stolen images were used to generate sexual content that ended up on a website.
The detainees are all male, one in their twenties and the other three in their thirties, detailed via telematics to this media outlet the supervisor of the case, Chief Inspector Kim Young-woon, of the Cyberterrorism Response Division of the Investigations Directorate of the National Police Agency of South Korea.
The hacked devices were IP cameras, digital video surveillance devices that transmit images and audio over a network, such as the Internet, allowing remote monitoring, and which are easily acquirable globally.
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In the case of two of the detainees, the content obtained was edited to produce more than a thousand videos of sexual content that they sold to a website in a third country for a combined value of 53 million won (about 30,100 euros / $36,000), according to details published by the Police, who indicated that they are implementing measures to prevent further damage to the victims. The videos produced by these two people account for 62% of the videos published on the aforementioned platform in the last year. The other two detainees had stolen images stored, but it was confirmed that they did not distribute or sell any of them. The detainees, who did not work together, infiltrated the devices with ease because they used vulnerable passwords with repeated characters or sequential numbers, the Police pointed out, which has asked users of this type of cameras to change their passwords immediately and renew them periodically. Three other people were arrested for buying and viewing illegally filmed material and sexual content through the website involved in the case, and the authorities do not rule out additional arrests. Asked about the country where the web portal to which the images were sold is located, and which South Korean authorities are trying to block for a possible closure, Chief Inspector Kim did not want to offer details as it is an ongoing investigation.
