My first catch. Remember to lock your doors.

[vulpes]

This is my first catch from last year. It's from before I took home surveillance seriously. I got into it after installing cameras in bird nesting boxes. For fun I put one of the test cameras at the front door, one in the back(both Vivotek IP8331 640x480), and later in addition a Vivotek IP8134V 1280x800 dome for the driveway. They were all set to motion detect, but after this incident they were set to 24/7 recording. The cameras are since upgraded, and multiplied.

I was sitting by the computer, when I got a notification from the door camera. I took a look on feed, and saw this guy. I was puzzled, because I hadn't heard the doorbell(he pretended to push it for anyone who could see him). To be honest, I didn't go to the door because of a non-pleasant BO at that moment. But then I suddenly get a notification for the back door, and I immediately go to the back door, turn on the lights and go outside. I see no one, but wondered if there was anyone around the corner(which there was), but I don't follow. When I get back inside, I see him taking off on his bike, he got away. It was only then I got to review the recording of what had happened. I was steaming.

When the police report was filed, it turned out there had been incidents in the neighbourhood with someone going into peoples unlocked homes during the day, stealing what he could get his hands on. We haven't heard back from the police since, so the case hasn't been put away. The fact that one of the victims was a police officer might have something to do with it :wink-new:

 

[Mike]

Wow, nice catch!

 

[Michelin Man]

Nice. Well grainy, and the fact you didn't get to smash his face in.

I wonder what he was looking for with the flashlight. Maybe he was checking to see if it was an Medeco.

 

[DemonicHawk]

They were all set to motion detect, but after this incident they were set to 24/7 recording.

Very nice indeed! but any particular reason you chose to change it to 24/7 recording? It doesn't seem like you missed anything.

 

[OldStyle]

Damn. I like it how you casually walked outside though.

 

[tangocharlie]

Sorry not to stick strictly to subject Vulpes, but am about to put cameras in birdboxes for my kids to look at.
Did you use IR?
Any sample images?

 

[vulpes]

Damn. I like it how you casually walked outside though.

The criminals around here have knives at worst, and I'm not too concerned about my own safety. In the video below of a garage door checker, I'm not that casual. He went behind the house, where it's pitch black, and was about to climb the fence to the neighbour. I could only see a silhouette, but shouted "Stand still! Stand still!" (I learned the phrase in my youth from my cousin's LEO-husband messing with me when he saw me around. Piss my pants hilarious.) It seems like he had heard that before, because he immediately stopped what he was doing, and blurted out his full name. He came with a bullshit story about looking for his sons bike, but he hadn't done anything illegal per se. I later looked him up, and he was registered with 8 cell phone numbers at a local treatment centre for addicts. My neighbour told me that the lock on the garage was broken, so I might have prevented a theft.

 

[vulpes]

Sorry not to stick strictly to subject Vulpes, but am about to put cameras in birdboxes for my kids to look at.
Did you use IR?
Any sample images?

I used the cheapest PoE camera I could find on ebay. Ended up with a camera with awful firmware, firmware version dictated exposure, and it had a "hidden" streaming service. I noticed it due to unknown traffic going out to China on my firewall. It wasn't possible to turn off, so I blocked it from reaching the outside in the firewall. I blocked the IR-diodes except one, and put a lens from some reading glasses bought at the "dollar store", in front of the camera lens. Here's an example of what it looked like.

[video]https://youtu.be/Wg8zDDEgAeo[/video]

Very nice indeed! but any particular reason you chose to change it to 24/7 recording? It doesn't seem like you missed anything.

The motion detection didn't register him coming and parking his bike. I think it would be nice to see all the things the motion detect doesn't pick up. There are some areas with poor contrast at night, that makes motion detection more difficult without a lot of false positives. I also use it to find out which of the cats around here that owns the newly deposited poop. It doesn't help on the problem, but at least I have found out which cat is the worst offender, and can chase it away when I see it.

There also was a break in in the empty house next door in May, where I only had two internal wireless cameras on motion detect. They left before they could finish, because one door downstairs had only markings of a tool, but was intact. Lights from passing cars activated the motion detection, so I was alerted to the break-in that same evening, but there was no one there. Only two rooms were searched through, only old stuff from my grand parents long passed away. Seems like something made them leave, maybe the stairwell camera. If they had gotten through the kitchen door, the other camera had definitely picked them up, and there would have been confrontation.

It made me put up an external wired camera over the door, and one week passes, and someone who seems to know the door had been broken down, shows up. Notice he doesn't ring the door bell, and he checks the door that had been forced open the week before. After some questioning he made a slip of the tongue and told me "that there's never anyone around here", so it was obvious he kept his eye on the property. I told him to never show his face around here again, and he whined that I was threatening him. There hasn't been any incidents since, so problem solved for now. Sorry for the double post.

 

[erkme73]

I used the cheapest PoE camera I could find on ebay. Ended up with a camera with awful firmware, firmware version dictated exposure, and it had a "hidden" streaming service. I noticed it due to unknown traffic going out to China on my firewall. It wasn't possible to turn off, so I blocked it from reaching the outside in the firewall.

A wee-bit OT, but... This is a very important point that many people don't consider, understand, or even know about. Even the Hikvision cameras have a phone-home client, which by default is turned on. Even if you had the ability to turn everything off on the camera, it might still be accessing the internet and communicating with the manufacturer.

Both Tomato and DDWRT (and perhaps other stock router firmware) offer the ability to exclude specific LAN IPs and IP ranges from ANY internet traffic. To keep things tidy, my LAN is broken into two subnets - 192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x. Everything in the .1 range has access to the WAN. The .2 subnet has zero access.

A simple way to test this is by going to the camera's GUI, and have it try to set its internal clock using a NTP time server (if that's an option). If you've severed the connection to the web properly, it'll fail.

This means you will not be able to access the cameras from the WAN, so you'll need to use a NVR (like Blue Iris), which resides on the .1 WAN-enabled subnet.

In order for devices on the .1 subnet to talk to .2 devices, the subnet mask will have to be 255.255.252.0 (instead of the traditional 255.255.255.0).

 

[vulpes]

A wee-bit OT, but... This is a very important point that many people don't consider, understand, or even know about. Even the Hikvision cameras have a phone-home client, which by default is turned on. Even if you had the ability to turn everything off on the camera, it might still be accessing the internet and communicating with the manufacturer.

Both Tomato and DDWRT (and perhaps other stock router firmware) offer the ability to exclude specific LAN IPs and IP ranges from ANY internet traffic. To keep things tidy, my LAN is broken into two subnets - 192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x. Everything in the .1 range has access to the WAN. The .2 subnet has zero access.

You're totally right. I block all the devices on my internal network I don't want to be reached or reach the rest of the world in my hardware firewall. This summer, I regularly checked the logs to see what was poking around, and in addition to several Chinese IPs, Shodan was snooping about.

If something is exposed to the outside, and Shodan discovers it, you should hope that the security of the device is up to date. For instance, the security flaws at Patreon was discoverable through Shodan. This is why the "Cameras"-bug in Blue Iris was so bad.

 

[erkme73]

Remind me again what the 'cameras' bug was...

 

[vulpes]

Some time ago, an update to Blue Iris made it so that, if you ran Blue Iris as a service, it automatically created a user called "Cameras". This user had no password. It's detailed in this thread. https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/5540-User-Cameras-with-no-password-do-you-have-one

 

[erkme73]

Thanks @vulpes. I was unaware of that issue. I run BI as a service on all of my installations, and after checking, found no 'camera' users. Whew...