CCTV Hack: You must have heard the news of hacking a mobile phone or laptop many times, but recently a case has come to light which has shocked everyone. In South Korea, four accused hacked not phones or laptops but 1 lakh 20 thousand CCTV cameras and sold people’s personal photographs as sexual exploitation data on a foreign website. Nowadays, the trend of installing CCTV at home has increased in India also. People get it installed immediately for the security of their house and belongings, but they do not know how the CCTV installed in the house can change the direction if it gets hacked.
If you have installed this camera in the hall also, then hackers can see everything even in your bedroom by changing the direction of the camera. Now just imagine that everything from your eating to sleeping records will reach the hackers in a jiffy. But after all, how do they do this, and how can you keep yourself safe from this, we tell you this.
How do hackers change the direction of your CCTV?
Nowadays, IP cameras, i.e. those cameras which connect to the internet, seem cheaper and smarter than ordinary CCTV, hence many people are installing them in their homes and shops. But this internet connection makes them an easy target for hackers. If the password is kept simple or old, then any person sitting far away can hack the camera and see your house from inside. Meaning, the more convenient it is, the more danger there is.
According to a HuffPost report, most CCTV and IP cameras get hacked because people never change the factory default password (like admin or 12345). By keeping such a password, a hacker can access your camera while sitting at home. Not only this, according to the report, there is a website ‘Shodan’, which roams the internet and finds cameras whose password is still default and shows their live video to the whole world.
Many times hackers steal these videos and put them on foreign adult websites and if you click on a fake email or message, you get trapped in the phishing trap, then your password directly falls into the hands of the hacker and then he can keep an eye on the inside of your house every moment.
How to keep the camera away from the eyes of hackers?
If you also have CCTV in your house, then you can protect your cameras from the eyes of hackers. For this you just have to keep some important things in mind.
The first thing to do is to change the old company password (default password) immediately after installing the camera and create different and strong passwords for each camera. Like 12-15 characters which include numbers, uppercase-lowercase letters and also add special signs. Never add an old password used elsewhere to the camera again. Wherever there is an option, definitely turn on Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), that is, after entering the password, a code will also come on the phone, only then you will be able to access the camera’s activity and most importantly, always keep the camera’s software or firmware updated to the latest version. Because hackers can get information very easily from the old version. If you just do these small things then no person sitting far away will be able to see your camera.
Apart from this, keep changing the password every thirty days. Always keep updating the software and firmware of the camera. Do not install the camera at all in the bedroom, bathroom or where you change clothes and if you ever feel that the camera is rotating on its own or any strange sound is heard, then immediately change the password and immediately complain to the police or cyber cell.
