If you remember in years gone by the movies depict the crazy stories of the misfits robbing the liquor store or the gas station. The nervous bad guy, gun in the shaking hand, manages to get a couple of hundred from the till. The shootout or car chase commences. Caught, and jail time very soon after. Next, is the wise daftys that go for the rich pickings in the stately homes or posh street mansions. Why rob the liquor store for a measly couple of hundred when there’s gold and jewels in them there streets! In the movies, there’s someone home, even if its just the MCGuyver type genius kid to thwart their attempts. In real life though, the bad guys are well aware of the bigger fish, and the wee fish too.
What about going to bed at night and forgetting that the door hasn’t been locked? Keys just inside the door? The cabin with the valued bicycles, would you hear someone taking the hasp off with a power drill?
Your on holiday and ask your family member to look after the house….
Time is all someone needs to break in.
But, your OK, you had CCTV installed a couple of years back, its got an app, and an alarm system, cool new locks too.
But….
What about your network? Did you make sure that its secure? Today you’ll never see the bad guys, if your unlucky, they can find out when your out, where your going, what your doing and more.
Scary eh?
But why am I trying to scare the bejesus out of you?
Well, We know security. There is all sorts of things going on every day in this field and its our job to keep you and our clients informed, involved and protected.
This isn’t a hard sell, this isn’t a product review, this is real world information that you can use to protect yourself.
Today, its about CCTV. More and more as a company we are being asked to either, install new systems or, look at old systems and ‘fix’ them. From our perspective, old systems are something that we try to avoid. It becomes that old adage, how much money do you want to throw away? Old systems are exactly that. Technology that in this day and age has been rendered obsolete. You know the ones, some one has been snooping about and you try to view that footage on the screen, it could be an alien as far as you can make out…. Blocky, distorted, freakin useless! Crap picture, and even worse trying to use that CCTV recorder and if it ever had an app I cant find it again…..
Cameras and recording devices that can be installed and operated on the infrastructure of the modern home or business. That to you folks is a single wire Category 6 cable. Think about it, we can put a camera on those cables in your home that can plug into your router, TV and many other devices you use every day. These cameras and recording devices can be viewed from anywhere in the world, and can present an image to you where you can actually make out the features of someones face if you need to. Using this infrastructure and these devices that is the very beginning of what this kind of system is capable of. AND, most importantly they can be protected on a network by the latest cutting edge network security protection devices and systems.
Ok so this is where the beginning of this article and CCTV cameras come together.
Keep asking that security question, are your cameras keeping you safe?
You have the latest cutting edge IP Camera system, its on your home network. You need to be able to view that remotely, you also need to ensure that your system is protected.
Here’s why…
Over the past few years we as a business have spent a lot of time securing networks, network devices and access to these networks. One of the biggest issues we find is that security cameras and alarms. They are supposed to keep you safe are connected to the internet and have not had their passwords changed from the factory defaults. So what does that matter?
Here’s why…
A site indexing 73,011 locations with unsecured security cameras (not so safe!) in 256 countries …with default usernames and passwords. The site, with an IP address from Russia, is further broken down into insecure security cameras by the manufacturers, some listed only as “IP cameras,” as well as 11,046 of the links were to U.S. locations, more than any other country. The site advertises that you can see into “bedrooms of all countries of the world.” The site also shows the City, Latitude and Longitude of the feeds location. And yes it is in clear violation of the computer fraud and misuse act! There are mechanisms out there that an experienced researcher would use to find out information like this, Shodan is one such source, however, in this case this is a dodgy Russian site that has indexed these cameras and put them all on display for the world to see. Im sure you wouldn’t like your baby camera or home surveillance system to be part of this website.
Moral of the story? Be aware, dont be complacent. Something just as simple as changing a username and password can make things so much better.
