Hacking or security breach of the surveillance systems is always a concern, more so for private surveillance systems installed at homes and offices. The public security surveillance is managed professionally by taking all the required precautions and any breach is also detected immediately. However, when it comes to home security systems, most of the times the hacking attacks go unnoticed as most of the system owners are clueless about them.

How to Know If Your System Is Hacked?

Most of the times, it is difficult to know that your system is compromised unless you are really vigilant. Any breach or malicious activity generally slows the performance of the device. This happens because the home systems generally have limited memory and with attackers leveraging it, it makes the usual operations very slow and unstable. But, before jumping to a conclusion, you should check the network signal as this poor performance could also be the result of a poor signal.

Here are a few precautions that one should take to prevent hacking attacks, though no system is immune to it.

  • Make your wireless network safe. It’s better to secure it with WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 2), which is the security method that is added to WPA to enable stronger network access control and data protection.
  • If encryption can be enabled, do that using the surveillance system’s administrative tools.
  • Always update the camera firmware whenever an update is released. This is important because these updates are released with the sheer aim to plug in any vulnerability that surfaces with time.
  • Having a long, unique and random password of both the network connection as well as the admin software of your security cameras is very important. Keep both these passwords different and change them every few months. Never disclose your passwords to anyone.
  • One very effective solution to keeping the surveillance system safe is to have a separate network for them. This doesn’t go with the philosophy of building up a smart home, but it does help in arresting “land and expand”. Thus, if any one of your other devices is hacked, then the hacker won’t be successful in taking control of all other devices attached to the common network.

These are a few of the precautions that will reduce your chance of falling victim to hacking attacks. Though it is difficult to be totally shielded from any such attack, these basic precautions definitely add multiple layers of security, which dissuade the attacker to try their luck on your system.