South Korea removed 1,300 cameras from its military bases after discovering they’re designed to feed back to a Chinese server

South Korean army soldiers at a military base in Gyeryong-City, South Korea. Image used for illustration purposes.

South Korea’s military has been forced to remove over 1,300 surveillance cameras from its bases after learning that they could be used to transmit signals to China, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.

The cameras, which were supplied by a South Korean company, “were found to be designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally by connecting to a specific Chinese server,” the outlet reported an unnamed military official as saying.

Korean intelligence agencies discovered the cameras’ Chinese origins in July during an examination of military equipment, the outlet said.

While some of the cameras were near the border with North Korea, they weren’t monitoring it and were instead focused on training bases and fences, the official said.

“No data has actually been leaked,” they added.

Around 100 of the cameras have been replaced with locally-produced equipment, Yonhap reported.

The announcement comes amid a crackdown in many Western countries on Chinese-made surveillance equipment, amid fears of loose security practices and ties to the Chinese state.

Two Chinese manufacturers, Dahua and Hikvision, were blacklisted by the Trump administration in 2019 after being tied to human rights abuses of China’s Uyghur population.

Since then, seven more Chinese or Chinese-backed telecommunications and video surveillance companies have been added to an FCC ban list.

The UK has also barred Hikvision cameras from some sensitive government sites, while in February last year Australia began removing hundreds of Hikvision and Dahua products from its government buildings.

Even so, a Radio Free Europe investigation revealed in May that a large number of European countries remain dependent on inexpensive Dahua and Hikvisions security cameras — even at sensitive sites like military bases and police headquarters.

The Chinese manufacturer of the equipment used at the Korean military bases wasn’t named, but according to Yonhap, the military is considering legal action against the supplier, which is suspected of falsifying paperwork on the cameras’ origins.