Just bought another Amcrest-- should I be worried?
I think these were banned from import due to potentially having a back door that foreign actors can exploit. I use my cameras on a local network and don't have any sort of DNS that would give someone remote access.... don't use any sort of cloud service. Do I have anything to worry about security-wise, other than someone sitting outside my house trying to break into my network?
Comments
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The main concern with these cameras is that they may "phone home" every now and then to transmit some unknown information (probably just business intelligence, but who knows). It depends how concerned you are about this. You could prevent this by blocking their Internet access (either by limiting the network details they have, configuring a separate VLAN, or by Segregating IP Cameras on their own LAN).
What you really don't want is for the cameras to be able to receive direct incoming connections from the Internet, because then they could be hacked. This shouldn't happen by default. The only way the camera could configure this automatically is by using UPnP to set up a port forwarding rule in your router. So the two things to check here are 1. whether UPnP is turned on in the camera, and 2. whether the router shows a UPnP-created port forwarding rule for the camera.
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I have a mix of Reolink and Amcrest - mostly Amcrest. I have them and the Mac Mini running SS on their own VLAN. In addition - I have a firewall rule in place that prevents them from talking to the internet (either direction). You need 2 network connections on the Mac, one for the camera VLAN and one to your trusted network so you can access SS. Other than that, it is pretty straightforward.
I can tell you from looking at the firewall logs, they are constantly trying to call home. It could be legit for things like firmware updates. But I can isolate them if I want to check for that.
Not sure if that helps. But I have been operating like this for years and never had an issue.
