Chinese manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co. will recall up to 10,000 webcams following last week's cyberattack that denied access to some of the biggest websites in the world, the company told Reuters on Tuesday.

A member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence committee asked three federal agencies on what steps the government should take to stop hackers from hijacking electronic devices, Reuters reported.

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Last week, cyber criminals accessed several hundreds and thousands of devices and carried out a distributed denial of service (DDoS). They flooded the U.S. internet infrastructure provider Dyn with an uncontrollable amount of traffic that it could not cope, blocking access to several websites such as PayPal, Spotify, and Twitter, Inverse noted.

Xiongmai will be calling back the surveillance cameras after experts found they had been targeted in the attack.

Liu Yuexin, Xiongmai's marketing director, anticipated the number of devices affected to be less than 10,000. He added that the recall will first start on the first few batches of surveillance cameras made in 2014, which were more of personal rather than industrial use.

Xiongmai had already addressed the issue in the earlier products. It prompted users to change their default passwords and block telnet access.

"Internet of Things devices have been subject to cyberattacks because they are mostly based on the Linux open source system," Liu told Reuters. "Our R&D development had been looking to develop products based on other systems since 2015 and plan to do more in the future."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had already discussed the attacks in a conference call with 18 major communication service provider, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. It will also now work on creating a new set of "strategic principles" to ensure the safety of internet-connected devices.          

On the other hand, although authorities are still to identify the suspects, James Clapper, U.S. National Intelligence's director, said on Tuesday that early investigation did not point to a foreign government, saying the evidence suggests it is "amateur, attention-motivated hackers."

TagsXiongmai, Xiongmai webcams, Internet of Things, DDoS Attack, distributed denial of service, Cyberattack, Surveillance Cameras, Dyn