On July 19, 2024 at approximately 10:42 PM my BI NVR with 9 cameras whited out (the images recorded were white in a non-uniform fashion as if a phenomenon was being recorded) as if overwhelmed by a lighting bolt. 3 of the cameras did not come back online and went "dead" while the rest continued to function. The 3 cameras are on the same BV-Tech 8 Port PoE Switch with 1 Gigabit Uplink while the other 6 are on another POE switch of the same brand.
5 days later the three cameras come back online at 8:04 AM (I think simultaneously).
During those black out days I figured maybe the electrical panel tripped a circuit, or that the POE switch burned out, or ...
Well, when the cameras came back on line I felt hacked was the best explanation and when I came home that felt even more true since the circuit board wasn't tripped and the little freezer on that circuit was still frozen with no signs of melting.
ANYBODY HAVE SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPEN TO THEM? Do you have an explanation?
P.S. No lighting strike signs on the roof or building.
Having read your initial post I still have no clue what you’re trying to say or inferring to.
So I’m going to break this down because there’s a lot to unpack here.
There’s a problem with the BI NVR because all the recorded video is white. If you play back that video what period does this white out cover?!? Is there anything audible/ visible regardless of how small on the recording ?!?
Three cameras went dead?!? You know this how?? Because you can’t access the internal webpage of the camera? You can’t ping the cameras? If the system has the most basic monitoring present you would be able to review the logs for reboot, cold start, illegal login, NTP, etc.
Im going to assume you don’t have any kind of NMS in place and thus no SNMP traps enabled or Syslog server logging.
A basic ping monitoring system would validate if the camera / NVR / Network Appliances were not reachable. Which only provides some insight and isn’t a silver bullet as to everything.
It goes without saying if email alerts are setup this too would offer another layer of insight.
So the initial belief is lightning was present. Your only cursory review is checking the roof for signs of lightning???
99.99999% of all lightning damage comes via wiring. It doesn’t matter if it’s cable, telephone, satellite, Ethernet, etc.
A large percentage of lightning damage comes from induced (EMF) voltage through the air and injected into the wiring / electrical system.
As a lay person your only method to know if lightning was root cause is to go through the entire house. Review everything that was connected to an outlet / circuit and validate how they operate.
This cursory review (still) doesn’t tell you with 100% certainty that a device isn’t damaged! If you see something obviously damaged / burned that is the extreme case.
Almost in every case 99.999999% the components in the various devices are damaged and simply have a shorter life span or begin having odd issues to behaviour.
As it relates to breakers tripping during a lightning event.
By the time a individual breaker never mind the main breaker trips. You would know immediately because everything on that branch circuit would either be on fire or clearly BBQ!
Than, your reference to the freezer board?!? I’m going to assume you mean the pilot light that indicates there’s 120 VAC present?? As this doesn’t tell you the freezer is frozen / at temperature.
Lastly, we come to being hacked???
You have what in place to determine this root cause?? Do you have a firewall monitoring all the network traffic in your LAN / WAN??
Are you port forwarding?? Using any of a dozen P2P services? Subscribed and using any of those cloud services without any regards to network security, segmentation, isolation, and separation???
This is where you are right now: 0 Facts
This is where you need to start: 1 Gather Facts