Quite a few people on my street have cameras, usually right over the garage door watching the driveway. I have not heard of cameras being targeted in my area, but just as a precaution I try not to draw attention to mine. If your network cable is accessible, also possible someone might try to hack into your home network from it. Nayr mentioned having his cameras on a separate, isolated network.
cam235, thank you for passing on those comments and design ideas (and credit to nayr). I do try to think through the design aspects as much as possible. So, I'm running 12 cameras off of a home built, dedicated PC with two networks. One network is our general network, and the other network is dedicated to the cameras ( on a .100) IP network. This secondary network runs out to the garage to a 24 port POE switch and all cameras are hardwired. When we go on vacation, I add a couple of wireless cameras to the interior, just in case a burglary did occur. The physical hard drives are located 6 feet away from the Security PC, connected by eSata cables, behind a "hidden" panel. The concept is, if someone did break in, grab the Security PC, they would not have time to figure out and locate the actual hard drives (HD) with all of the images/video on it. Two additional hard drives have been added to make a total of 4. One, for the OS, the second HD is the main storage for the
Blue Iris image/video. The newest two drives were to alleviate any bottleneck from the read/write functions caused by the increase in License Plate Capture video. (I was getting times when the video capture was inconsistent. Three cameras are triggered together when a vehicle approaches for either direction, so a lot of video was heading toward the same disk drive). Time will tell if this resolves my issue or not.
The idea that started the question about "camera as a target for theft" was a recent robbery of school nearby. They targeted the security cameras. It sure is starting to sound like vandalism vs a quick cash crop for bad guys, based on responses from you folks. That is good news!