Man, I hadn't thought of that as being a threat.

There are probably zillions of brands of inexpensive, insecure cameras out there from companies that have gone out of business and which were poorly-set-up or configured. Usually not a huge issue, but for military operations in urban areas, it's gonna be a pain.

Countering that is going to be tough.

Maybe disallow security cameras above the third story or something like that, so that any one camera can only see so much. If you can break into one way up and rotate it, which it sounds like they did, then you have good odds of being able to see a lot.

Or disguise the military hardware, which also helps address humans who might be spying.

I remember a while back stumbling arose a forum or web page or something that was just a list of web cams that had ip’s anyone could connect to through a browser, part of it was people playing a sort of geo guesser game and figuring out out exactly where the camera was.

Always felt super weird and surreal, like, I remember two in particular, one was probably a cam in some officer building in Japan. I sat there and watched this guy work on his computer for a like a minute and realized this dude probably had no idea he was being watched by some random weirdo.

Another was a camera on what was probably a Venezuela oil rig, this one had little in built servos so it could pan left right up and down, the inputs for this were open along with the video feed. I wiggled it up and down a bunch out of fascination for like a minute, then a guy I. A hard had and a high vis fest was walking by, he froze and looked at the camera. I stoped moving it and then slowly nodded it up and down. He just started and I closed the page, feeling a little freaked out.

To this day I refuse to have a web connected camera uncovered in my home, I put post its or tape over anything I can’t physically get rid of.

I remember Mirai botnet that scanned for default password on IoT cameras.

They could definitely become a weak link.