Current and ex-employees say inattention to data protection at Verkada is emblematic of a “bro culture” that tolerated sexual harassment, misleading customers
Verkada Inc.'s security camera customers were livid. Hackers had breached footage from thousands of surveillance devices trained …
Bloomberg
Context & Ripple Effects
The Bloomberg piece closes a year-long arc of Verkada reporting rather than breaking new ground on the breach itself: VICE first documented staff using the company's own cameras to watch and harass women coworkers in October 2020, and in March three former employees revealed that 100+ staff could view customer camera feeds through widely shared super admin accounts. Today's story supplies the connective tissue current and ex-employees draw between those facts — lax data protection, a culture that tolerated harassment, and sales pitches that oversold security to customers whose footage hackers then breached.
It also lands inside a wider pattern the corpus tracks: SAP's mishandling of rape and harassment claims and DataCamp's long cover-up of misconduct against its CEO show culture failures surfacing through employee testimony and press exposure after internal channels failed.
First-order effects
Verkada's enterprise camera customers — already livid over the hacker breach of thousands of devices' footage — now face evidence the company's own insiders had broad access to their feeds, undermining the security positioning its sales relied on.
Current and former employees have publicly tied Verkada's harassment problem to its product-security posture, forcing leadership to answer both as a single governance failure rather than separate issues.
Second-order effects
Competing cloud-video-security vendors gain a differentiation lever built on access controls and auditability, since Verkada's super-admin model shows buyers what unchecked insider access costs them.
Enterprise procurement teams evaluating surveillance vendors can now be expected to probe workplace culture and insider-access policies alongside penetration tests, following the same scrutiny SAP faced over how it handled accused managers and complainants.
Third-order effects
If the Verkada–SAP–DataCamp sequence holds, culture and security due diligence converge: investors and regulators treat tolerated harassment as a leading indicator of operational risk at data-sensitive companies, with employee testimony and investigative press replacing internal HR as the disclosure mechanism.
Surveillance vendors specifically face structural pressure to redesign permission architectures around least-privilege defaults, because the reputational price of broad insider visibility to customer feeds is now demonstrable.
The trend: At data-sensitive startups, workplace-culture failures and product-security lapses are increasingly exposed together by employee whistleblowing, collapsing vendor trust into a single governance question.
Videos uploaded to Instagram show Verkada employees partying during the pandemic and chanting “Money! Money! Money!” (Verkada said the party was a “lapse in judgement,” employees told us this happens frequently.) https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Phew, this story. Sadly, it ain't new; I heard similar stories about life inside certain other tech companies in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s. But like everything else that's supersized about SV these days, this is just ... MORE. https://twitter.com/...
The US has a systemic infosec vulnerability: our key institutions have granted privileged access to PE/VC-backed vendors, like Verkada & $SWI, who cheap out on their own infosec to maximize profits (& lie about it). The only fix is real consequences for this kind of negligence. h…
NEW: ‘Bro Culture’ at Camera Maker Verkada Pushed Profits, Parties This story is based on interviews with eight current Verkada employees and 15 former employees. (w/ @mcbridesg @rj_gallagher @BrodyFord_) https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Two former staffers described a loud discussion in the open-plan office about a well-qualified job candidate. A Verkada marketing executive said he didn't want to hire her because she was a mother and wouldn't be motivated to work on weekends. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
This is the same company that Tillie Kottmann for reported on for their poor operational security, as they've left their systems open to intrusion. https://twitter.com/...
One pointed question came from Sequoia, Verkada's most prominent investor: How, inquired Silas Thomas, information technology manager at the VC firm, can we cut off Verkada employees from access to Sequoia's cameras? via @WilliamTurton + crew https://www.bloomberg.com/...
“Verkada gives frat boys a bad name.” “We acknowledge that early on, our internal policies did not initially keep pace with our rapid growth; however, we have taken several steps to ensure we are creating a supportive and inclusive environment.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Verkada employees raised alarm in 2018-19 about widespread use of Super Admin accounts, which gave access to peer into 150k customer cameras. The company was slow to act. In March, hackers gained access to a Super Admin acct & plunged Verkada into crisis: https://www.bloomberg.co…
The employees told us about a sales manager who exposed himself to a female colleague. Booze & cocaine in the office. Drunken wrestling in a mattress store. Chants of “Money!” “Money!” & large staff parties during Covid lockdown. It's all in here: https://t.co/mT4KeOmIAB
Our investigation of US surveillance camera company Verkada. Current & former employees describe “bro culture”, harassment of women, alcohol & drug use in the office, misleading marketing claims, & lax security standards that led to a massive recent hack: https://www.bloomberg.co…
A dynamite story about a company whose lax security led to a breach of thousands of security videos of schools, prisons, hospitals and corporations around the world 👇 https://twitter.com/...
My favorite part of this story about Verkada's toxic work culture is that when engineers complained that the sales team played WAP at top volume and chanted “Mo-ney! Mo-ney! Mo-ney!” management told them to buy noise-canceling headphones. https://www.bloomberg.com/...