A South Korean military official told Yonhap News on Friday that over 1,300 Chinese-made surveillance cameras have been removed from military bases, including bases near the North Korean border, after the South Koreans belatedly discovered the cameras were capable of transmitting information back to China.
The official added assurances that “no data has actually been leaked” from the compromised cameras, and they were primarily employed for monitoring training fields and base perimeters, rather than highly sensitive tasks such as monitoring the North Korean border.
According to Yonhap, the South Korean company that sold these 1,300 cameras to the military is suspected of falsifying their country of origin. The military is contemplating a lawsuit against the company over this misrepresentation.
Sometime in late July, South Korean military and intelligence officials realized they had littered their military bases with potentially compromised Chinese equipment. Upon closer inspection, they discovered the cameras were “designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally by connecting to a specific Chinese server.”
Something similar happened in Australia last year, when the Defense and Foreign Ministries discovered their Chinese-made cameras posed a security risk.
In March, the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security completed an investigation that found some Chinese-built cranes installed at American ports contained mysterious cellular modems that were not part of their original design specification or installation contract.