How your webcam can get hacked

TL;DR: Our smart devices are increasingly being hacked—used by attackers to track military operations in wartime…or simply to wreak havoc in supermarkets. It’s a problem made worse by weak passwords, outdated software, and AI tools that make break-in attempts easier to enact en masse.

What happened: What’s better than an actual human spy for gathering strategic intel on your wartime enemy? Apparently the roughly 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras now scattered across the world, per a new Wall Street Journal report. The investigation reveals how common it’s become for smart devices, from webcams to traffic cameras, to be commandeered by hackers during conflicts.

Ukraine’s security service, for example, reports that Russian hackers took over a number of residential webcams across Kyiv in 2024, intending to use them for missile strike planning and targeting. The agency says that, since Russia’s 2022 invasion, it’s secured, reoriented, or shut off roughly 40,000 cameras that could potentially be exploited.

How your devices get hacked: Imagine installing a camera in your chicken coop, then noticing one day that your connected app had been switched to a different language. That’s how one farmer in northern Israel discovered that hackers were using his camera to watch military movements along the Lebanon border, per the WSJ.

And it goes to show that unless you regularly check on your devices (or get an obvious tell like a language switch), you might not know that anything’s wrong. Experts say that any gadget connected to the internet could, in theory, give hackers a way in—including, say, your baby monitor or robot vacuum. (In the office, videoconferencing equipment is particularly vulnerable.) These cyberattacks are often possible because devices go unpatched or still use default passwords—and AI now makes it easier to breach a whole lot of gadgets at once.

Beyond your home: It’s not just personal devices, either. On Sunday, smart fridges and freezers in hundreds of French supermarkets were hacked by an unknown group—who turned on defrost functions that caused the appliances to reach temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The hack spoiled potentially millions of euros’ worth of food for one affected chain and reportedly started fires in some stores. Many of the hacked fridges were apparently either running outdated firmware or so old that they no longer received software updates.

Bottom line: If you’d prefer not to have your cameras taken over by hackers—something that could become even more common thanks to AI—there are a few very simple ways to prevent that. —WK

Also in cybersecurity…

• An AI company is reportedly helping police pinpoint addresses based solely on photos of their interiors and devices—by matching the images against Airbnb and Zillow listings.