Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus • Hacker News Board

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#31

Post by xoa » Sat, May 16, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

...where are, at a trivial minimum, the VLANs!?!? Or even outright separate physical architecture, but at the very least even the absolute cheapest prosumer Omada/UniFi/Mikrotik/whatever switches and WAPs made for the last decade+ will give you some simple segmentation for free. I don't understand, apparently they had cameras and other devices in a single flat network space that any rando BYD could cruise around in? Like, sure, absolutely change default passwords, better provisioning, consider what info DNS or other side channels (like certificate transparency if you use a public CA and don't use a wildcard) might reveal, use internal VPNs even for trusted devices to access certain stuff, etc etc. But it still feels like simply isolating security/surveillance and other restricted use devices should sorta be the 101 first layer of the onion and if that wasn't done yeesh.

If this was written 20-25 years ago sure, but in 2026? Wild.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#32

Post by giobox » Sat, May 16, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

The 554 RTSP restream thing is something I see a lot in badly configured NVR setups. Many NVRs are configured to restream the cameras they watch, the idea being that only the NVR watches the camera's feeds directly to reduce the CPU load on the relatively weak CCTV cameras - the beefy NVR server can restream to many more clients instead of them all talking to the camera individually.

There are so many of these tools that simply re-stream the RTSP CCTV feed with no support for using any sort of authentication though - the expectation is you configure firewall rules appropriately so only the "correct" devices can view the feed on the open port.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#33

Post by tybstar » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

Reminds me of the time in college I realized that the university network's dynamic DNS configuration was wrong and that if I named my Linux laptop with the same hostname of the mail server, I became the mail server when I connected to the network. (I used an ethernet jack in the cafeteria and a random PCMCIA network card I found in the help desk stash so they wouldn't trace the problem back to my school laptop. The IT department already hated me for unrelated reasons.)