A group of hackers have breached up to 150,000 Verkada surveillance cameras across hundreds of companies and organisations around the world.

The hackers were able to gain access to live and archived footage from inside a Tesla factory in China and a show room in California, as well as an Alabama jail, hospital rooms, a police interview area, and a community gym, according to a report by Reuters.

Swiss software developer Tillie Kottmann, one of the people involved in the hack, told the news agency that the small group of hackers sought to draw attention to “the pervasive monitoring of people” after they found login details for Verkada’s administrative tools publicly online.

The camera manufacturer said that it had acknowledged the hack and disabled all internal admin accounts.

“Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified law enforcement” said the company.

Kottmann told Reuters that the surveillance camera maker cut off their access hours before Bloomberg first reported the breach on Tuesday.

If it had wanted to, the group of hackers could have used its control of the cameras to access other areas of company networks at Tesla, Cloudfare, and Okta, Kottman said.

“On Tuesday we became aware of a report around Verkada and Okta," said Okta in a statment. "The Okta service has not been impacted. We are continuing to investigate the situation and will provide updates as relevant additional information becomes available.”

The hacking group provided a list of Verkada user accounts which includes thousands of organisations, including gym chain Bay Club and transport tech start-up Virgin Hyperloop.

Reuters said it couldn’t independently verify the authenticity of the list or screenshots distributed by Kottmann, but they included detailed data and matched other materials from Verkada.

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