After the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Kremlin began to fear its own surveillance cameras — because they too can be hacked
After the elimination of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Russian special services temporarily disconnected part of a special video surveillance system used to protect Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. The tools that authoritarian regimes create to monitor their own citizens have turned into a vulnerability that their adversaries can exploit. Financial Times provides details .
Collage created with artificial intelligence tools
This is not about the almost 300,000 cameras that monitor Moscow residents, but a separate closed network designed for the security of the Russian president and his inner circle. According to sources, after the assassination of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Russian special services temporarily disconnected part of this system. It was restored only after a large-scale check and additional measures to isolate it from the internet.
The reason for this reaction was an Israeli intelligence operation that used large amounts of video from Tehran's traffic cameras to determine the location and time of Khamenei's meeting with his closest advisors on February 28. During the strike, which marked the beginning of a joint US-Israeli military campaign against the Islamic Republic, several high-ranking representatives of Iranian security forces were killed.
FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov on May 26 warned regional security chiefs about a new threat. According to Russian state agencies, he called the killing of Iranian officials a "clear warning signal" and stated that their whereabouts were partly discovered thanks to software "backdoors" in Tehran's video surveillance systems.
According to FT interlocutors, Israeli analysts used new technologies to create a detailed map of Tehran, study the behavior of high-ranking officials' security, and identify desired targets from millions of hours of video. The information obtained was combined with other intelligence, including agent intelligence.
New capabilities and threats
A real leap in the development of such systems occurred around 2023, when commercial artificial intelligence models learned to create videos from text commands. The reverse process — searching for video by text description — opened up new opportunities for analyzing information collected daily by surveillance cameras. According to FT interlocutors, another significant breakthrough occurred about a year ago.
New tools significantly outperform traditional facial, license plate, or weapon recognition systems. If previously programs could only perform a limited set of predefined queries, now systems allow searching video recordings using text descriptions and looking not only for specific objects but also for behavior patterns.
For example, the system can find two people exchanging a bag, a person who changed clothes or appearance several times during the day, a car that was recently repainted, or a car that repeatedly passed through the same location.
Vladimir Putin in March 2025. Photo: politician's press service
As FT notes, citing former and current intelligence officers and high-ranking officials from four countries, the new capabilities of artificial intelligence are causing serious concern among special services. Billions of dollars invested by states in video surveillance systems could turn into a tool for their adversaries. This particularly applies to traffic cameras, which effectively allow studying the lives of entire cities and even protected facilities.
After identifying a specific person, such systems can quickly create a detailed dossier spanning several months of their life, reconstructing not only routes and habits but also their circle of contacts. Moreover, modern complexes are capable of combining information not only from surveillance cameras but also from social networks, intercepted messages, smart devices, and movement history.
As FT reminds, similar technologies are also possessed by the US and UK, who have already provided Ukraine with precise intelligence for targeting strikes, including data obtained from high-quality drone videos.
At the same time, China is actively developing such systems. Beijing is investing in a new generation of AI-powered cameras and software capable of interpreting scenes, detecting behavior patterns, and finding desired footage based on text queries.
However, as a representative of one of the countries of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance noted, these investments simultaneously open up new opportunities for China's adversaries: "They install cameras. We just need to find a way to get into the system. And a way will always be found."
Surveillance cameras on a street in a Chinese city. Photo: Witthaya Prasongsin / Getty Images
How to protect yourself?
The realization that a country's own surveillance system could be so effectively used against itself caused shock among counterintelligence officers worldwide.
Their first reaction was an attempt to close vulnerabilities in the cameras themselves — an incredibly difficult task, given that surveillance networks consist of equipment from different generations.
One reaction to the new risks was India's decision, which from April 1, 2026, effectively closed its market to internet-connected surveillance cameras from several Chinese manufacturers, including Hikvision and Dahua.
This came after FT reported on the Israeli hack of the Iranian video surveillance system. At the same time, as the publication notes, the Iranians themselves also gained access to Israeli security cameras, but without modern analysis systems, the effect of such operations was much smaller.
New capabilities cause particular alarm in Russia. Concerns about Putin's security existed even before, as Ukrainian special services had already gained access to Russian traffic cameras and used other digital data, including mobile phone location information, during operations against high-ranking Russian military personnel.
According to one independent Ukrainian hacker, cameras in Moscow and even around the Kremlin are still regularly subjected to hacks. He did not specify whether Ukraine is capable of analyzing these data streams on an industrial scale.
The Washington-based company Airis, co-founded by veterans of Israeli electronic intelligence, already offers systems capable of finding people by characteristic behaviors. For example, smugglers with large nylon bags at night or armed individuals with specific patches and tattoos.
Airis co-founder Rotem Abeles notes that in the last year alone, the use of artificial intelligence to analyze various data streams, including information from social networks, has reduced the time to perform such work from days to minutes.
However, even these systems are far from perfect. Their adversaries are often groups that use very simple means of communication — handwritten messages or old analog telephone lines.
A revealing example was the search for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, whom Israel considered one of the organizers of the October 7, 2023 attack. Israel and its allies deployed significant resources to find him, including using gait analysis, trying to identify Sinwar by his characteristic manner of moving in a crowd. However, in October 2024, he was killed during what Israeli military later called a chance encounter.
In the last moments of his life, recorded by a drone that failed to recognize him, Sinwar wore protective glasses and a tightly wrapped scarf that covered his distinctive ears. As FT notes, this simple disguise proved effective against high-tech search methods.
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