"Don't buy cheap Chinese-made security cameras, because their security may just be terrible"

t_andersen

Young grasshopper
Joined
Oct 5, 2014
Messages
90
Reaction score
17
Location
Sweden
Not really true. Not forwarding and/or blocking incoming ports just prevents unrequested incoming traffic. Unless you block/filter/isolate it in some way, then if it's on your network it can generate valid outgoing and two-way traffic in response all that it wants to just like any other local machine on your net. That includes simple annoying stuff like phoning home through at least potentially things like setting up tunnels, capturing local network traffic and forwarding it out, downloading and executing malware, attacks against remote and other local computers, altering its own firmware, etc., etc.
I believe that this i very true. I have a conventional system with 4 cheap Chinese IP cams and a Windows PC running BI. After the major virus attack all over the world a few months ago, I blocked the IP cams for outbound traffic in the router to make sure that they cannot access the internet. Any inward connections are of course also blocked (no port forwarding). I have then recently looked into the log file of the router and noted that the Chinese IP cams indeed do try to access the Internet. Last week, I have changed to a new router model with better logging facilities. I will try to figure out any pattern or additional info from the attempts of the cams to access the internet. The brand of the cams is Szinocam. They are really cheap and otherwise perform well. You can get the same cams with other brand names as well.
 
Top