South Koreans’ cameras turned against them in digital sex crime wave
Four people have been arrested in South Korea over the hacking of home cameras to make exploitative footage, as human rights groups warn that such crimes are rising
They are used all over the world, in bedrooms and nurseries, offices and homes – small video cameras that film a sleeping child or elderly relative and transmit the images online so that they can be viewed on a smartphone.
But the handy technology, a digital update to the old-fashioned baby monitor, has been exploited in horrifying ways in South Korea, where hackers stole intimate images and sold them on to Chinese pornographic websites.
According to police in Seoul, hackers uploaded footage from tens of thousands of “home cams”, earning tens of thousands of dollars. Their targets included private homes, clothes shops, pilates studios, waxing salons, karaoke parlours and a gynaecology clinic.
According to South Korean investigators, the four suspects, who have not been identified, did not know one another and worked independently in exploiting the vulnerabilities of the cheap and easily available internet protocol (IP) surveillance cameras.
CCTV is usually isolated from outside networks, but users of IP cameras connect their smartphones to wifi systems that are vulnerable to hacking. The hackers know that many people do not change the default passwords on their new cameras, which are often simple and obvious sequences of letters and numbers such as 1234.
One of the people under investigation hacked into 63,000 cameras, created 545 sexually exploitative videos and sold them through an overseas website, earning about 35 million won ($35,810) in cryptocurrency.
Another, who hacked 70,000 cameras, made 18 million won. Three out of five of the videos posted on the website had been supplied by these two South Koreans. Two other suspects, one of whom hacked 15,000 cameras, did not distribute or sell the footage but stored it for their own use. One is charged with producing sexually exploitative content of children. The others are charged with illegal hacking and two of them with selling sexually exploitative material.
Police say they have identified and contacted only 58 victims, all of whom have been offered counselling.
South Korean media reported that the website through which the images were sold was based in China. They are in touch with foreign police in an effort to suppress the site.
“Crimes related to IP camera hacking, illegal filming materials and sexual abuse materials are serious offences that cause immense suffering to victims,” Park Woo-hyun, of the National Police Agency’s cyber crimes office, said. “We will actively investigate to eradicate these crimes.”
South Korea’s position as the world’s most wired society has given rise to an epidemic of “digital sex crime”. In many cases, men use tiny spy cameras to capture illegal images of women without their consent, sometimes for blackmail or to sell on pornographic websites.
Human rights organisations say that the country’s technological sophistication, together with a conservative attitude towards women, have combined to drive the rise in such crimes, which are often not taken seriously by the courts.
A report by Human Rights Watch in 2021 documented cases in which women agreed to nude modelling only to see the images distributed online against their wishes, and others in which partners took explicit photographs with consent and published them later as “revenge porn”.
Some women who did not submit to explicit photographs found that they had been digitally faked by embittered ex-boyfriends.
Some of the most extreme cases involved devices using digital cameras, some as small as a button, which can livestream images. One woman identified was the object of romantic overtures by her married boss, which she rejected. But she accepted the gift of a clock which she put in her bedroom. She later discovered that it concealed a camera through which he could watch her 24 hours a day on his smartphone.
South Korea has one of the world’s highest rates of smartphone ownership, some of its fastest wifi, and internet in 99.5 per cent of households. But it has low rates of sex equality, coming in at 94 out of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index last year. Camera hacking can take place anywhere and for a variety of motives.
In May, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre said that Russian state hackers had gained access to about 10,000 cameras near Ukraine’s border, including those at railway stations and military sites.
The Times
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