How To – Prevent CCTV System Hacking

How To – Prevent CCTV System Hacking 1

Find out how you can keep your CCTV system safe

Installing a CCTV system is a great idea for making your home more secure. But with many CCTV systems offering access via the internet or through your smartphone, they can be a target for hackers.

A hacker is someone who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data. In the case of your CCTV system, this data would be the images your CCTV cameras capture.

So how do they gain access? Every device that’s connected to the internet has an address called an IP address (IP stands for Internet Protocol in this context). It’s these IP addresses that allow your smartphone or computer to connect to your CCTV cameras wherever you are in the world.

What the hacker does is use software or websites to trawl the internet looking for the IP addresses of CCTV cameras. Once they find one, there are a number of ways they can then try and gain access. The easiest is when the default username and password used to log in to the camera hasn’t been changed.

All the hacker has to do is use software to determine the model of your CCTV camera, type in that model’s default username and password and they will then have full access to your camera.

So the first step to securing your CCTV system is ALWAYS change the username and password.

The next thing a hacker could try is to exploit a vulnerability in a CCTV camera’s firmware. Firmware is the computer code that is stored in the camera’s memory and tells it how to operate. If hackers discover there is a flaw in this coding, they can use it to gain access to your system.

Because of this, CCTV camera manufacturers work constantly to make sure their camera’s firmware is as secure as possible. As soon as they become aware of a situation like this, they will produce a ‘patch’ to seal off the vulnerability. They will then instruct users to update their firmware to the new ‘patched’ version.

The problem with this is lots of CCTV owners don’t update their camera firmware regularly. If a camera is still using old firmware that has a vulnerability, hackers can continue using it to access the camera.

So the second step to securing your CCTV system is ALWAYS keep your CCTV camera’s firmware up to date.

So you’ve changed your username and passwords and your CCTV camera firmware is up to date. All sorted right? Not quite.

Another way a hacker can gain access is to use a Brute Force attack. This is where a hacker guesses different combinations of username and password to try to find the right one. Now, if the password is 8 characters long and you were to do this manually, it would take thousands of years to find the right one. However, using computers to make millions of guesses per second, a hacker could crack an 8 character password in a matter of minutes.

The moral of this story is to use longer passwords. If you avoid common words and use a combination of upper and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols, a 12 character password would take a computer many years to crack, rather than minutes.

It’s also worth saying that hackers probably aren’t going to devote huge amounts of resources to crack a long complex password, just so they can get a view of your driveway. In most situations, a hacker is looking for low-hanging fruit – insecure systems that use old firmware or the default username and password. However, if you want to make your system as a secure as possible, long passwords are the way to go.

The final step is to secure your WiFi. If your CCTV cameras are connected via WiFi and a hacker gains access to your wireless internet network, they could also access your camera feed. To avoid this possibility, make sure your wifi password is as strong as possible (see previously).

At Mint Security, we install CCTV cameras that are the latest models from reputable manufacturers. We will make sure your system is using the most up to date firmware and go through the setup procedure with you to make sure you can choose a username and password that’s extremely difficult for a hacker to crack. As an NSI Silver accredited company, we are assessed every year to make sure our work meets the highest standard. To see the difference Mint can make to your home security, get in touch today on 01246 888 444 or email [email protected]