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Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

threatpost.com

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Re: Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

#11
post #4

Somewhat off-topic: Recently I watched a news segment in Korea about CCTVs connected to the internet without proper security: so many were wide open, and some could even record sound and play it real-time, and their lists were plainly accessible on some websites. The reporter said that the government had responded by blocking these websites from the Korean internet but people still found ways to access them via VPN.…

There is or was a subreddit for linking to such potentially unintentionally accessible live feeds. One way to find them was to google certain terms/directory structures/page names that the viewing pages contained. Sometimes they even had panels that let you control the camera's direction.

That is also what shodan is about.

> Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices

Re: Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

#12
post #8

Seriously folks... put all those cameras behind firewalls, and only grant access to them over a VPN.

Put the cameras behind firewalls, only allow access to them from the NVR, and only on the port(s) the NVR needs. No reason the entire internal network should have direct access to them.

Re: Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

#14

My house security and automation systems are all behind a firewall and access to them is proxied, including the video feed concentrator for the security cameras. I've had folks call this overkill but I won't directly expose any IoT-like thing to the Internet these days.

Unless you left upnp enabled, in which case all precations are useless.

Re: Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

#17
Any Internet-connected device is, in fact, a server, and must be seen and managed as one. This means strict control of installed services and, first and foremost, regular updates of all its software components (including firmware). If you acquire and install such a server which either can’t be updated or one which you know, realistically, won’t get any updates six months after installation, that’s asking to lose.

Re: Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

#18

My house security and automation systems are all behind a firewall and access to them is proxied, including the video feed concentrator for the security cameras. I've had folks call this overkill but I won't directly expose any IoT-like thing to the Internet these days.

I done more or less exactly the same - IoT devices are on a separate hotspot, they can't talk out to anything (even pings to the gateway are dropped), and the only thing that can talk in is a specific address on my LAN.

Re: Zero-Day Bug Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras

#19
post #10
post #8

Seriously folks... put all those cameras behind firewalls, and only grant access to them over a VPN.

Next: "Zero-Day Bug in VPN Software Allows Hackers to Access CCTV Surveillance Cameras"

That would only be a headline if the VPN software were somehow camera-specific, which seems unlikely. That fact alone is a benefit to using general-purpose security tools: more eyes on it, making a zero-day that much less likely (and a fix that much faster).

Another benefit is that updating a single instance of firewall or VPN software is much easier than updating dozens of cameras. Of course, if there are more VPN clients than cameras, that ceases to be true.

Adding such a layer is also just a kind of defense-in-depth. With the instant example, both the cameras and the VPN software (or firewall) would have to have vulnerabilities, at the same time.

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