What a great idea, home security that you can access on your smartphone from just about anywhere.  You can ensure your home is safe or keep track of your family, pets and so much more through a live videostream.  But is your security system secure?

Recently I was watching CBC Marketplace and saw an episode on Home Security Cameras. 

What surprised me was the ease of access for anyone to view your security feed from anywhere on the internet. I thought I would check it out and searched the internet to see how easy this is to look at. 

The first site that popped up easily with my search was https://www.insecam.org.   On this site you can look at thousands of live feeds by country, most popular, places, manufacturers, Cities, time zones and new cameras.  Now most of these streams are of harmless outdoors, entryways or other non-private spaces, but I am sure if I delved deeper it would be no problem to find cameras that stream living rooms and other private home spaces.

You can now order or purchase a live streaming home security camera system from just about anywhere.  Amazon and Best Buy are a few. 

So how do you keep your security Cameras safe and private?

First: Make sure your stream is password protected.  

The main reason that your cameras were hacked is that the manufacturer did not prompt you to change or enter a password thus your camera is still operating under the default user name and password. This gives your system an open IP address for anyone to access and put up on their website as a live feed.  Make sure you purchase a system with advanced encryption and you should be good to go.

Change the Password right away.

Make sure your username and password are secure by using a password that is at least 6 characters long and has upper, lower case letters along with numbers and characters.

Update the manufactures firmware.

When you purchase a camera it may have been on the shelf for a while.  Each manufacturer should have updates available to stop the hackers.  Look into this and do your updates to make your system secure.

 Watch the full episode of Marketplace here.  https://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/episodes/2018-2019/home-hack-how-safe-are-your-high-tech-security-devices

Article by Sondy Szymanis