There’s more to good opsec than encrypted transport, but for most people this is probably true. Maybe also avoid being in camera view especially without MFA.
it’s funny the vnexpress would publish this. vietnamese people are obsessed with security cameras. they see them as a deterrent, or as a way to find the perpetrator later and get all your property back. they put them everywhere.
Why the fuck do people put security cameras in their bedrooms? It’s so weird to me that people do this. Even if you think (or at least thought) that you were the only one with access to the footage, won’t the presence of a camera make you feel like you’re being watched? Are we not on camera enough as it is that we have to be on camera in the supposed privacy of our bedrooms? Imagine if you told George Orwell that people would willingly put cameras in their most personal and private spaces.
I’m just about to setup TP-link cameras connected to Frigate (NVR software) with a Coral TPU for offline object detection. This means I can block access to internet for the cameras and use a VPN home if I want to watch them.
Onvif camera (It’s the standard. Any camera that supports onvif will be plug and play). Block the cameras’ Mac addresses at your router so they can’t get out directly. Install zoneminder on Linux. If you need remote access follow all the guides to securing a Linux server that has ports open to the Internet. (Ssl, tailscale etc.)
Blueiris for Windows is great but it’s not open source.
I use a old phone with IP cam on it, and only allowed local network access connected to my home assistant.
I can view it remotely via home assistant cloud, which is E2EE from instance to phone.
I presume Raspberry Pi Camera is also a great solution. And also I dont put any camera in bedroom or bathroom, because there is no reasonably accessible entrance there.
The security issue you mentioned I think only affected when they handle access to the cameras. I think you can set up a VPN and then turn off remote access on the NVR, so it seems possible to avoid that issue.
That being said that’s a lot of work for something they should have handled securely in the first place and doesn’t give me much confidence about their security in general.
So, just an FYI, I bought Eufy cameras because I believed their marketing bullshit about being secure and end-to-end encrypted. About two months later they changed how they describe their security and quietly modified their privacy policy. Turns out they’re not really end-to-end encrypted and it is possible to gain access to the streams sometimes.
My recommendation, after doing my research is not to buy anything that is able to be viewed remotely. Buy something that stores the video locally, in your home. If possible, buy and install wired cameras.
If the device dont provide local connection, there is nothing home assistant can do about it. Some device will also send data to the cloud even it is locally controlled by HA.
Home assistant is great at what it does, but the problem is too big for HA to really fix it by itself.
It’s the end-devices that are the biggest culprits, paired with the apps installed on your phone. It’s the reason Google was basically giving away their home-mini’s the last couple years.
If you use a smart device that comes with - or requires - an app, it’s almost guaranteed that app collects a certain amount of data from you to be sold or utilized for user profiling.
The problem is that everyone has half a dozen of those devices already, and swapping them all out takes time, effort, and money that most people simply don’t have.
It’s a challenge even for the truly dedicated and privacy-minded individual to know which devices are locally hosted and which ones use local internet access or a permissive phone apps to function. Even if you DO manage to keep a clean slate, there are always companies that change their policies once they have high-adoption and force cloud integration on their users. See Phillips, Chamberlain, Microsoft, Google, Amazon…
I love Home Assistant, but it’s a nightmare trying to cut out all the unsecured bullshit I’ve found myself with even in the past two years.
Thanks to laziness of the device manufacturers, a lot of them either expose some data endpoints locally, or just use Zigbee which can be easily paired to be used local-only.
Those that require Wi-Fi access can be filtered on the router to disable internet access.
Which is why these companies that are marketing wifi and cloud-polling devices should be held responsible for the data breaches and regulated more rigorously.
It should be cost-prohibitive to design a smart device that sends data to a centralized server, but they do it because the upside value of having the data is so attractive. They shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind a ToS agreement with mandatory arbitration when their security is inevitably breached.
Seriously. It sounds like you have an informed and well-reasoned opinion. They’re not 100% corrupt. And they usually only hear about tech from industry lobbyists.
Let them hear from an intelligent constituent for a change.
Having done this before and being told to basically get stuffed from one of their underlings I have zero faith in it. It’s basically just another token thing that’s about as useful as “thoughts & prayers” for the most part.
I don’t mean they literally told me to get stuffed. They won’t personally take your call nor read your letter. You might get lucky and they’ll let you physically come into their office but that’s about as far as you’ll get.
I do it when I can, but that kind of influence just can’t be done by a handful of tech-literate terminally-online weirdos. It takes a buttload of money or a massive amount of public attention to push an issue like this forward, especially when political operatives absolutely benefit from both the data and the companies involved. The political calculus just isn’t there.
More people need to know and care about this before any legislator is going to spend political capital on it.
sure but not securing them in their own network somehow?
There are driveways, front porches, some sort of office somewhere and even someones 3d printer all with rough coordinates and that’s without actually diving deeper into all of this.
I saw a building that looked like it was waiting to be boarded up. There were some streams with beautiful scenery. There was an official looking meeting room in Greece for, and I even found a stream of a train table!
Edit because im being down voted, i find it so insane that you guys are actively seeking out hacked ip cam footage from innocent people that’s being leaked online.
There’s tons of porn on the Internet, and no reason for you all to be trying to PAY SOMEONE for non-consensual sexual footage
You can’t connect home system that is never connected to internet, basically make home server and hook up cameras and don’t ever connect that to internet
The problem is cameras like these, the kind that people are putting up inside their own homes, facing their living spaces, their own damn bedrooms, they’re sold to people that have this desire to be able to check in with those cameras remotely at any time, without a good reason.
The only reason my mother seems to have crap like this set up is so she can see the dogs when she’s not home. They’re just sleeping.
Internet connected, living space directed cameras are this bizarre consumer electronics trend that has no legitimate use case for like 90% of the people that rush to use it. Certainly not one that merits the security risks and the privacy invasion that they are inviting on themselves.
No I don't. Like the first example above I can simply trojanise an executable, and release it to the public.
Once I'm on your network, the first thing I'm always going to do is see what I'm working with. That means a network and system info sweep. If I'm efficient, I already have a script to do this.
That sweep will reveal the presence of the camera. I might be interested in extortion material or I can sell this to a criminal gang, if I can get it open. I already have the camera's MAC address, so finding the make and model isn't too hard.
Then I might browse to it, see what system software it is running. Then I would try default usernames and passwords (people don't always change them) and see if there are any usable exploits on the software.
If I come across a certain camera type with certain vulnerabilities a lot, making a script to autofuck these cameras is child's play.
John Hammond’s got some pretty good “getting started with White Hat hacking” videos on his YouTube channel (a lot of “hack a box” and “CTF” style videos). He’s got one or two where he talks about his resume and training/classes he’s done.
With that kind of background you've got a good advantage. You probably know how people fuck up their implementations as rookies, the next step is learning to take advantage of it.
Depending on the areas you want to get into (web, mobile, infrastructure, web3, etc) there are a lot of different training materials you can do. Most are free or very affordable.
Basic infrastructure stuff is a must, but it's really simple. Your main tool for this will be either Nmap or massscan, both are port-scanners. You need to learn some basic flags and understand why you might want to use some and not others depending on the scenario (you probably already know at least some of this already). This is usually the first technical step in any operation.
Basic Linux and Windows command line is also a must. You don't need to be able to do Linux From Scratch but you do need to be comfortable with Linux (and Windows) command line; if you manage to get a shell (illicit remote access) on a victim box, this is what you'll be using to get around. An industry standard toolkit also comes in the form of a Linux distro, namely Kali Linux.
For more advanced infrastructure stuff, check out the HackTricks gitbook, it's really helpful.
For web (not web3) based stuff, you can start with Damn Vulnerable Web App and OWASP Juice Shop. The former is far more tutorialy but the latter has all sorts of walkthroughs. Understanding why this works is important to understanding in future what kinds of stuff work, which is important when people actually put in (bypassable) protections.
If you want to go through more of a web3 route, get familiar with the Remix IDE and check out Ethernauts.
For mobiles, it's important to have jailbroken or rooted devices, especially in the case of iOS. Check out Damn Insecure and Vulnerable App (Android) or Damn Vulnerable iOS App (iOS). The OWASP Mobile Testing Guide is also a really useful read.
Once you get comfortable, you can also check out Capture The Flag challenges hosted by other people. CTFTime is a good aggregate for these and HackTheBox is a good training ground for them.
I would generally recommend these tools before going onto certs; once you're good at these, you'll breeze through the certs with a light refresher on course details, however the certs are an expensive way to actually learn.
As for which certs, CompTIA Pentest Plus is a good starter. Offensive Security Certified Practitioner (OSCP) is a good mid-level cert, and CTFs are a crazy good preparation (this exam is much more practical-based than your standard exam). Don't listen to some LinkedIn lunatics that call this a starter exam, it absolutely is not, and they probably have never taken it. It is, however considered something of a gold standard in the industry; if it isn't a minimum requirement, it is considered VERY helpful in most job applications.
It isn't a common feature on ISP provided routers, which is what most people use. Some ISPs (example: my own) even make it exceptionally difficult to use other routers. I had to install OpenWRT on my retail router to get it, and getting that working was such a pain.
It kinda depends on the setup I think, especially when vlans and firewalls are involved, you’d likely need additional payloads to make further progress in that kind of environment IMO. Something granting persistent remote access to the compromised machine would be the most ideal option.
As always physical access is pretty much game over though lol.
My cams are only accessible via an authenticated endpoint hosted on a dedicated machine, which acts as a “bridge” between the VLAN that the cameras are on (no internet access), and another VLAN hosting internal services, like home assistant, plex etc.
Aside from physical access, the only way to access the cams (that I can think of) would be via some exploit in Home Assistant, or by brute forcing the password to (any of) my network switches to access the management VLAN, changing the VLAN the cameras are set on to something else (bypassing the routing, firewall setup, and auth “bridge” entirely). Or maybe just exploiting the bridge machine directly and dropping a payload to forward the cams out to the net via the services VLAN
With physical access, you could chop up the PoE for an external camera and using that as an ingress point - but you’d only have access to the cameras and the bridge machine unless you exploited that too. At this point the zabbix client on the bridge machine would have notified me that a camera’s dropped off the network, unless you dropped a payload to force it to return a good status lol
Ok… But cloud services are centralized and have a lot more content to obtain, so that fundamentally makes them a more valuable target. This alone adds a level of relational security to maintaining a home backup of the information. Unless someone happens upon your home network and decides to hack it, or you download a file that sends up a flare, nobody is going to seek it out unless they know you have something specific they want.
If you have an IP camera system exposed to the outside, they will “happen upon you” within the hour.
It’s one of the top things searched for in wide net port scans.
But unlike those cloud services, your home network likely doesn’t have enterprise level threat detection to alert you to it, or a team of network engineers to try to guard against it.
Why the fuck are you broadcasting a beacon to come hack your network? Of course they are going to find it if you light it up like a Christmas tree with a giant neon sign. I said you set up your cameras to record locally. Only an idiot would set up a camera system with an unsecured exposed port. Hell, set up anything with an unsecured exposed port for that matter. Especially one that is an always broadcasting system. It doesn’t even matter if you use a cloud provider at that point. All they have to do is hack an network hop near your home and install a man in the middle and they don’t have to bother hacking a server farm to get your videos.
In general, cloud services have far better security than DIY systems.
Where are you pulling this from? These aren’t “DIY”. DIY is when you roll your own remote network access (e.g. VPN, DDNS, port forwarding, etc) or FOSS software/hardware. I’d trust most DIY systems more than any cloud provider, because most DIY systems would be LAN only or VPN accessible. The QR code authentication mentioned in the article sounds like these are generic IP security cameras of stock firmware, that utilize a cloud server to enable remote viewing over the internet. Even reputable cloud services use the same method to connect or setup individual cams to their cloud.
All of the hacked systems in this article are home based systems.
That doesn’t mean the exploits used are of no fault of the user — from the vendors authentication implementation, software, or hardware.
I’d almost say your exposure is bigger in the cloud. WAY more software involved, it’s shared environment, and someone elses computer… In addition, it’s complex to properly setup. People often leave it alone once they get it working, no security test or checks.
Even IF it was because it was hosted at home, I blame the companies who build this shit. Market to end users, “super easy to use!!” But no security by default? Nuts.
Enable auto updates, randomly generated admin password (no defaults like 123456), and support for more then 3 years will go a LONG way for the average consumer.
Maybe, but the difference is a lot more people are going to be looking to target the cloud provider than your home network. To say nothing of the fact that your videos on the cloud are subject to the terms and services that you agree to and those terms can be changed at any time. And also the fact that you can’t guarantee that the stuff you delete off of that server is actually being deleted.
a lot more people are going to be looking to target the cloud provider than your home network.
I can show you logs with tens of thousands of hits from all IPs all over the globe trying to gain access to a single NVR that has a port open on the WAN side of a network.
Besides email servers or FTP servers, cameras are the next highest thing target for attacks. The minute they go online they become a flaming red beacon for hackers.
All of the hacked systems in this article are home based systems.
[citation needed] because that’s not in the article. According to the article, attackers used automated scanning software, which strongly implies they brute-forced cameras connected to the Internet with default or weak credentials. That has nothing to do with whether or not the service is based in the cloud.
In general, cloud services have far better security than DIY systems
As a matter of fact, it’s known that the leading cloud-based surveillance system, Ring, has been subject to employee abuse and user accounts have been widely compromised via credential stuffing. In fact, Amazon is currently facing a proposed order from the FTC over the fact that they allowed abuse by employees and more or less knew for years that their lax security practices were placing their customers in danger from cybercriminals. Hell, it’s 2023 and all you have to do to pre-empt most credential stuffing attacks is enforce 2FA, and this was optional in a HOME SECURITY PRODUCT from a LEADING cloud provider. “In general cloud providers have better security” my ass.
Cloud based security only gets better when regulators force cloud providers to improve security, after cloud providers allow hackers to harm thousands to millions of customers.
I’m just gonna say it again: the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
According to the article, attackers used automated scanning software, which strongly implies they brute-forced cameras connected to the Internet with default or weak credentials. That has nothing to do with whether or not the service is based in the cloud.
This is a known problem with popular brands of security cameras sold in Vietnam, that the default configuration has an admin password of “admin” or “12345” accessible from the public Internet. They’re basically sold insecure, and rely on customers to consciously adopt a custom configuration to be secure.
Although, in order to be publicly accessible, one would imagine that they’ve had to configure their firewall to let outside signals to the devices themselves. Or maybe some kind of ddns setup.
Either way, it doesn’t have anything to do with the cloud, and the parent comment is basically right about that.
Although, in order to be publicly accessible, one would imagine that they’ve had to configure …
I’m guessing there are providers in Vietnam offering remote access accounts and apps, the same as 90% of IP security cameras on AliExpress, Amazon, eBay etc. Most of the zero config ones are authenticated with a cloud server 24/7 to enable remote viewing. This being Vietnam specific leads me to believe that the “hackers” are actually a domestic crime org selling compromised hardware; could be as simple as opening the box and obtaining device information (like the serial, MAC, or QR code) before shipping the product.
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