Looks like it wasn't the camera after all. I basically killed everything and started from scratch and have been tinkering for the past few months. The spike in usage was (I believe) related to a program on my kids pc called Steam (game interface). I used Glasswire to determine what...
I am pretty confident the camera was the culprit. I did have it set up to access remotely using apps on a couple of smart phones and ipads. I found that my son and wife both had it open in the background on their devices and I suspect that was the cause. I must have set it up wrong initially...
A few months ago I purchased and installed a Hikvision DS-2CD2332-I camera to monitor my driveway. I have it connected to my home network via my router and only view it on my pc and smart phones, I don't record or use any motion detection or other features. Basically, I just open the web page...