[bionoid]

Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose.

That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue.

I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?

[fapjacks]

This will not be shocking to you in the slightest, but: It'll look exactly the same!

[walterbell]

The next person who does this: please report the config problem to the camera vendor, then make the issue public after 90 days (or other reasonable timeline) if the vendor does not respond. This lowers the chance of future adversaries scraping images of the public from default-open camera feeds.