Security firm Verkada probes hack of "150,000 cameras"

A California firm is investigating a massive hack said to have affected 150,000 of its security cameras.
 
Hackers claim to have breached Verkada, a security company that provides cameras to companies including carmaker Tesla.
 
Stolen footage includes the insides of hospitals, schools and businesses, Bloomberg reports.
 
Verkada told the BBC it was "investigating the scale and scope of this issue".
 
The company also told the BBC it had notified law enforcement. However, it did not confirm the size and scale of the reported hack.
 
It is claimed the attackers were able to view videos from inside women's health clinics, psychiatric hospitals, prisons and even the offices of Verkada itself.
 
Companies whose footage may have been exposed include carmaker Tesla and software provider Cloudflare.
 
Cloudflare told the BBC that it had been alerted to a "handful" of cameras that might have been compromised.
 
In other footage, a Verkada camera inside a Florida hospital reportedly showed what appeared to be eight hospital staffers tackling a man and pinning him to a bed.
 
Another video showed officers in a police station in Stoughton, Massachusetts questioning a man in handcuffs.
 
Another inside a Tesla warehouse in Shanghai showed people working on an assembly line.
 
The BBC has not been able to independently verify these videos.
 
The hackers also said they had gained access to the security cameras of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed more than 20 people in 2012.
 
Speaking to Bloomberg, Tille Kottmann claimed credit for hacking into Verkada's systems.
 
The reasons for the hack, Kottmann said, were, "lots of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a huge dose of anti-capitalism, a hint of anarchism - and it's also just too much fun not to do it".

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