In fact, Check Point says it tracked similar Iranian targeting of cameras as early as last June during Israel’s previous 12-day war with Iran. The head of Israel’s National Cybersecurity Directorate, Yossi Karadi, also warned at the time that Iranian hackers were using civilian camera systems to target Israelis and had compromised a street camera across from the country’s Weizmann Institute of Science before hitting it with a missile.

The joint US and Israeli strikes on Iran and the assassination of Khamenei have revealed, however, just how thoroughly Israel’s own hackers—or those of its allies, including potentially the US—had penetrated Tehran’s camera systems, too. Israeli intelligence sources speaking to the Financial Times described assembling the patterns of life of Iranian security guards around Khamenei based on the real-time data that traffic cameras provided across the city. “We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,” one source told the FT.

Prior to the current escalating war in the Middle East, the powerful surveillance role of hacked civilian cameras first became apparent in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials warned in January 2024, for instance, that Russian forces had hacked two security cameras in the capital of Kyiv to observe Ukrainian infrastructure targets and air defenses. “The aggressor used these cameras to collect data to prepare and adjust strikes on Kyiv,” reads a post from Ukraine’s SSU intelligence service.

The SSU went so far, it writes, as to somehow disable 10,000 Internet-connected cameras—it didn’t reveal how—that could be used by Russia’s military. “The SSU is calling on the owners of street webcams to stop online broadcasts from their devices, and on citizens to report any streams from such cameras,” the post reads.

Even as Ukraine has attempted to block that spying technique, it seems also to have adopted it. When the Ukrainian military used its own underwater drone to blow up a Russian submarine in the bay of Sevastopol in Crimea, it published video that defense-focused news outlet The Military Times noted looked very much like it had come from a hacked surveillance camera. A BBC report about Ukrainian hacktivist group One Fist notes more explicitly that they were commended by the Ukrainian government for work that included hacking cameras to watch Russia’s movement of matériel across the Kerch Bridge between Russia and Crimea.