Keep Hackers Off Your Cameras!

According to Trend Micro statistics, just in the past 5 months, more than 5 million hacker attacks against IP cameras were blocked. In September 2019, researchers have discovered 15,000 private webcams around the globe which could be accessed by anyone from any device, raising serious security and privacy concerns.

That is what usually happens with regular IP cameras that can be bought in any store. They are usually sold along with an application, which allows you to watch the footage directly from the camera. This is the most basic and unsafe option. It is unlikely that someone will want to pay for such an unreliable service. There is also an issue with footage storage: you can only watch it online, but can it be saved on some sort of server? No, not with this option. The owner can hang this camera at the store, but it’s enough for potential thieves to get the recorder out of the camera, and all the information that it contains will be lost.

Port Forwarding? I Don’t Think So

If the operator that provides video surveillance service wants subscribers to pay for it, they must make sure that the video from the camera gets to the server and is stored there, in a safe, hacker-proof environment. The easiest option that many providers use is to configure port forwarding so that you can upload videos directly to the server. But this method is unsafe and very prone to hacking.

Improving the Firmware

There is another way — our Flussonic Agent software. It is installed on the camera and adds to the existing firmware the ability to get to the server via an encrypted connection and check its authenticity. After that, safe video transmission from the camera to the server is established. A small Agent compiled under Linux works under a huge number of architectures and platforms.

That is, with the help of the Flussonic Agent, we simply supplement the existing firmware on the camera, making it a more secure device.

Replacing the Firmware

But there are situations (first of all, this concerns Wi-Fi Only cameras) in which it will not work, and you’d need to erase the existing default firmware and replace it with one that turns the camera into a provider’s device. For this, we have Flussonic Iris. We do not steal existing subscribers of the video surveillance service from service providers: subscribers receive an application under the brand of a telecom provider or OTT service provider, and when accessing the video archive, the customer gets to a secure, reliable provider’s server.

All this greatly simplifies the work of the provider who no longer needs to spend large time and resources to independently configure a huge number of cameras at a time, in addition, they will no longer have to deal with hacking problems. Of course, it is very important that the image quality of the video is significantly improved, which directly affects the quality of video recognition of faces.

When we only started making Flussonic Iris, we didn’t fully understand what business needs it would serve. Now, in all of the European market, we do not know such competitors who could be able to give customers a solution in the form of a server, a mobile application, a billing system and firmware for cameras with web interface.