newbie: suspicious camera activity

[neuronetv]

I bought a cheap ip cam off ebay, a szsinocam 5034 and I've been watching its' traffic in wirehsark. I notice the cam is calling out and getting replies from 4 different ip's I don't recognise and I wondered if anyone knows anything about this cam and whether it's safe or not. Could it be sending snapshots out to specified addresses? It's a chinese make, the image is good but the documentation and support is terrible. I've tried doing a whois on the ip addresses but didn't find anything. Thanks for any help.

 

[Kawboy12R]

Turn off upnp on your router and don't port forward and see if that helps. It could be calling home base about cloud services or dynamic dns stuff as well.

 

[nayr]

just configure your router to block internet access too/from that camera.. they all call home to china.

 

[eeeeees]

Hi People
This calling home thing caught my eye. I have a bunch of 2 &4 Mp ONVIF generic cameras connected to BI4 which is not presently configured for web access. Its a dedicated PC so no other use than BI but it does share my network, all wire with no wifi. I am not particularly paranoid and have nothing to hide, but .................. I would appreciate comments on the security issues.
Eric

 

[neuronetv]

thanks for the responses here. I realised the solution was simple, I went into the network settings of the cam and changed the gateway to a false ip and also deleted the dns values too and now the cam can't talk to the internet. This cam is strange, it doesn't seem to have any way to correct the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9, does anyone have experience of these cams?

 

[smoothie]

Hi People
This calling home thing caught my eye. I have a bunch of 2 &4 Mp ONVIF generic cameras connected to BI4 which is not presently configured for web access. Its a dedicated PC so no other use than BI but it does share my network, all wire with no wifi. I am not particularly paranoid and have nothing to hide, but .................. I would appreciate comments on the security issues.
Eric

The simple way to prevent these cameras from talking to "God only knows who" is set their IP addresses statically and do not enter the "Gateway" / "Default Gateway" / "Router" value in the IP settings on the cameras. This way they would only have an IP Address and a Subnet Mask, no gateway or dns entries. Without a gateway value specified the cameras cannot talk outside of your local IP network. The cameras can talk to the BI4 machine as I am assuming it is on the same subnet as the cameras.

Alternatively you can go various degrees of complicated and either partition the cameras off logically (if you have a switch capable of vLan provisioning) or physically (multiple network cards in the BI4 machine and separate physical switches) so that the cameras can access the BI4 machine but not access the Internet, you would have to go this route if the cameras are on different subnets to the BI4 machine.

 

[smoothie]

thanks for the responses here. I realised the solution was simple, I went into the network settings of the cam and changed the gateway to a false ip and also deleted the dns values too and now the cam can't talk to the internet. This cam is strange, it doesn't seem to have any way to correct the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9, does anyone have experience of these cams?

Good call with the gateway, we both thought of the same thing about the same time haha.

I don't know those cameras specifically but I know some of the Longse cameras also have a fixed aspect ratio of 4:3 and cannot be changed, it could well be something that cannot be changed on these cameras as well.