Hikvision
More info
- Released
- Owner
- CETC (largest shareholder)
- Website
- hikvision.com
The world's largest maker of surveillance cameras, partly state-owned and therefore as much a geopolitical issue as a product.
Founded in Hangzhou in 2001, the company's largest shareholder is the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group. Low prices made Hikvision cameras and recorders ubiquitous, including under other brands that resold them as their own.
The US added the company to its Entity List in 2019, citing surveillance in Xinjiang, and in 2022 the FCC stopped authorising new Hikvision equipment. The engineering has not helped the case: CVE-2017-7921 let anyone bypass the login, and CVE-2021-36260 gave unauthenticated command injection through the web interface. Hundreds of thousands of cameras sat directly on the internet and became raw material for botnets. A camera pointing outwards does not mean nobody is looking in.