How to Protect IP Cameras From Hackers

Wireless home security cameras can be very easy to hack, giving criminals the real-time surveillance footage of your home at home. Perhaps you have noticed the sentence in our article on C6CN – “EZVIZ C6CN provides enough security as long as you can patch the common exploits deployed by the intruders”. This article talks about some of the common exploits and the way to patch them.

Commonly, most of you directly use the cable internet from the router. When multiple devices are connected with the router, you forget to think about how an incoming request is being handled by the router. As for EZVIZ C6CN, when you are using their mobile app to remotely view your home via the camera, the router “understands” which device you want to connect to. It is allowing you as external traffic to the private network. That is how the setup supposed to work. Your setup is allowing the whole earth to “try to talk” and that is without any dedicated hardware firewall and applications to add rules. The identity of your camera is becoming your username. IP cameras like EZVIZ C6CN have some storage even if you are not using their cloud storage and not inserted any memory card (so that the motion alerts work). So the obvious weak point is becoming your username and password.

Most peoples don’t invest the required level of diligence when it comes to router and IP cameras for home-usage. Hackers know this fact. The router is a single point of vulnerability. Most of the routers lack basic security. Many of the routers do not even require the owner to change the default login credentials. This article is not a guide on “how to secure your router” but now you can web search to find the way out.

The next point we mentioned at the beginning of this article – your router’s traffic is unmonitored, you have no dedicated hardware firewall. While many of the routers do act as basic firewalls, they offer pretty limited protection. This means if a device connected to the router wants to or made to connect with an external website, it can freely do it without caring about your wish. That does never sound great! Just an unscrupulous person who has once access to the device can manipulate the firmware to watch the home! Sadly, most of the security cameras by default “call” their official server. That is not great to build a strictly secured network.

It’s no secret that these cameras, like many other IoT devices, are full of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. Shodan and zmap are great tools to help the security peoples and they are commonly abused by the hackers. Shodan is a search engine for IoT devices including IP cameras and hackers can find potentially vulnerable devices through it.

This article is not discouraging to use the IP cameras intended to use at home. This article is for making you alert to execute the steps which will decrease the risks even the cameras are hacked.