Exposed: Verkada

Verkada is a US-based cloud surveillance company that operates over 250,000 cameras across schools, hospitals, businesses, and government facilities. The company markets AI-powered security cameras with cloud storage, facial recognition, and behavioral analytics. In 2021, hackers breached Verkada and gained access to live feeds from 150,000 cameras including those inside hospitals, prisons, Tesla factories, and Cloudflare offices, exposing the catastrophic risk of centralized cloud surveillance. The breach also revealed that Verkada employees had used their access to spy on female colleagues through the camera system. The FTC fined Verkada $2.95 million for the security failures and a separate investigation found a culture of sexual harassment where male employees created and shared images of female coworkers captured via company cameras. Despite these incidents, Verkada continues to grow rapidly, illustrating how the demand for cloud surveillance outpaces concerns about security and abuse. The company's model of storing surveillance footage in the cloud rather than on local devices creates a single point of failure that, when breached, exposes every camera customer simultaneously.