The strength of the password has no bearing on a hacker’s ability to compromise a system. It *might* make It slightly more difficult, but often that’s irrelevant. Simply for the fact that the port is open is enough to wreak havoc if a vulnerability exists. It’s VPN or nothing anymore for true security. With that being said, I port forward mine solely for simplicity and that’s why it’s so widely used. Simplicity and security are often mutually exclusive and simplicity wins the general public 100% of the time. For residential setups, VPNs aren’t typically an option with residential grade networking equipment, and I’m not going to tell every homeowner to sell their internal organs to purchase a SonicWall or Cisco product that supports that level of security. The exception to this rule is commercial environments where such equipment is already established, and especially those with PCI/HIPAA compliance requirements to where opening ports is not just frowned upon, it’s forbidden to the point where you will be fined.
Do keep in mind Hikvision is one of the most widely used CCTV platforms (under a variety of brands), is Chinese based (they probe and scan you more than the TSA could ever dream of), and distributed globally (mass market, mass target) That’s a trifecta worst case scenario in terms of vulnerability potential.
Back to your issue at hand though: factory reset, change the password to something you haven’t been using throughout this mess (add caps/nums/special characters too), and go from there. You’re not doing yourself justice by walking in a straight line while being shot at. Throw in some zig zags.
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