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Which brings the question:

Are the manufacturers stupid enough to put the items on the internet AND embed a self-destruct command...

These attacks are showing that's it's trivial to achieve remote-code-execution on many of these devices. So in a way, yes, they do have self-destruct built in.

Simple connect to one, and then overwrite the boot partition. Or rm -rf /. Or even just use the firewall to block all inbound and outbound connections (an IP camera isn't very useful if you can't view the feed).

The scarier thought to me is that this many cameras installed in houses, businesses, bedrooms, etc. are being commandeered. That's a huge problem for privacy, let alone being used as botnets on the side.

You are correct. I know there are sites out there that even aggregate camera feeds, although the more ethical ones remove any feeds where there may be privacy concerns.

Frankly, I would NEVER install such a device in my house. The engineering on many is (almost?) criminally flawed.

I don't think there is a self-destruct command ever from what I've heard. There are plenty of chips with undefined behavior that can be exploited to essentially act as a self-destruct. Failing that I assume there are ways to kill it by overrunning the device's normal mechanisms.

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