South Korea’s military has been forced to remove over 1,300 surveillance cameras from its bases after learning that they could be used to transmit signals to China, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
The cameras, which were supplied by a South Korean company, “were found to be designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally by connecting to a specific Chinese server,” the outlet reported an unnamed military official as saying.
Korean intelligence agencies discovered the cameras’ Chinese origins in July during an examination of military equipment, the outlet said.
Don’t all cheap IP cameras feed back to at least one server in China?
I bought two different no-name brands from Amazon several years back, and both models of them were trying to call home. I ran them on an isolated network, so they couldn’t get anywhere, but they were persistent little buggers. Oh, and the root password to one of them was hardcoded to “1234567” lol
Tangent, but if anyone can recommend a good IP camera that just craps out an RTSP stream locally and doesn’t phone home anywhere, DM me lol.
Don’t DM, reply so we may spread the word.
I’m really surprised that military in such a technologically advanced country just connected random IP cams to the internet
They were on sale!!!
That’s fine, I got them too but they’re isolated
It’s a big bureaucracy and procurement often just means going to the private sector and scooping up what’s on sale.
Non-zero chance the Koreans are running around with explosive pagers in their pockets right now.
Right?!
From the Yonhap article,
And also,
The TLDR is that these cameras were supposed to be sourced domestically but the company behind it committed fraud to make a quick buck.
Reolink, amcrest. Amcrest dont get anything starting with ASH in the model name.
If you want ONVIF, be sure to check the specs, many cheaper models drop support, but not all.
Some YI cameras have easily replaced firmware and can do rtsp too, but you have to do your homework on those models to be sure you’re getting one that can be modded.
You’ll still want to (IMO) toss any of them in a vlan without internet access, and rather than provide that vlan access to an NVR on another vlan, I’d lean toward your NVR having a second connection to that vlan. I’m a huge fan of segmentation though, so YMMV.
I can vouch for reolink, they have fairly straight forward nvr with decent cameras for the money. Been using their poe nvr system for around 5 years now and have never had an issue with it.
Yeah, that was my old setup: dedicated VLAN with the NVR and cameras in it. Had a firewall rule so I could access the NVR from regular LAN but nothing “got out” of the camera VLAN without being requested from the LAN first.
At first I had the NVR in the LAN with FW rules to reach the cameras in their VLAN, but my FW at the time struggled with all the simultaneous streams going through it so I moved the NVR in with the cams.
Maybe I’ll just stick with my current setup of just getting old analog camera housings and sticking Raspberry Pi + camera module inside lol
Dual nic NVR then? You could even just throw a simple switch with no uplink (but preferably managed so you can tag the traffic) and for extra safety just allow only the LAN traffic you want on the NIC/Port connected to your regular LAN from the NVR.
Nothing wrong with a DIY can though! As long as it works of course
“NVR” in my case is just Zoneminder lol. I run it on a dedicated USFF PC and didn’t want to deal with multi-homing it or a USB ethernet adapter. When I upgrade it, yeah, I’ll probably get something with a dual NIC and go that route.
Right now, yeah, it’s all DIY since I scrapped those cameras years ago (neither held up well to UV after 6-7 months outdoors), so I’m less concerned about it with all of them being RPis now. The only thing I lack is PoE since I didn’t want to spring for the HATs.
Yeah all of my servers are on usff PC’s, so I get it.
If you do a hypervisor like proxmox, then throw your NVR in a VM, you can just create a couple of virtual NICs (though you’ll be back at that FW issue I’m sure).
USB NICs are pretty well supported these days though, and cheap to boot. Just need to be certain you’ve got usb3 if you want to make use of that gig though!
I’ve got a few pi-a-likes that I’m doing similar camera fun with, though using some webcams in there and a 3d printed case. At least that way they match my diy temp sensors with esp32s!
Ubiquiti G3 and G4 cams do rtsp direct streams without needing Unifi Protect services on a unifi gateway device. G5 requires unifi prot but can rtsp from the protec gateway.
Same with russian ‘grandma phones’ with big buttons. Some researches found thst although they don’t provide any functionality besides basic phone\sms stuff, they do try to call their motherbase, sending all credentials and geoloc. IIRC there was no argument about them sending the content of smses and voicecalls, but it’s troubling as it is.
+ Russian as in sold there, they are chinese, sometimes with a local branding.
Just get some raspberry pi camera.
What to do about IR vision though?
I don’t currently have them, but there is (or was?) a NoIR version of the Pi cameras that didn’t have IR filters. That should let the IR LED illuminators work same as most other cameras advertised with night vision.
That would be pretty useful.
I’m still looking for how I might manage to use my old phone’s camera anyway. Seems like a waste of good engineering to keep the pinout and protocol closed.
Not a plug and play solution. But if you aren’t averse to tinkering. RPI zero with a CSI camera and v4lrtsp server. can get you done rather cheap. Depending on your needs.
That’s actually my current setup :)
Got some old analog cameras at an estate sale, gutted them, and put some Pi + camera modules inside. Couldn’t get the original optics to work with it, and they lack PoE, but they’re otherwise doing well (3 years and going). Just occasionally have to reboot them more than I’d like.
Haven’t messed with v4lrtsp server, but zoneminder has been good to me. Will check that out.
Yes you don’t get things like Poe Etc. At least not on the zero models. There are hats for the full size pi. But you have full control and they are upgradable. I have a zero w in the official enclosure. Double-sided tape to a wall with a micro b cord plugged into power it. Can access the stream over Wi-Fi and get 30 frames per second 720P easy. Could easily do much better than that even. But the original Raspberry Pi camera module I think is the limitation. Because the cores on the Zero are barely being touched at all. In the low double digits if that.
It’s so light on resources that if someone had an old USB hub. And some old web cameras laying around. You could run multiple cameras off of a single Raspberry Pi zero. I think you would hit Port bandwidth saturation before you would hit a CPU limit. Unless of course you’re trying to reincode.