Wireless CCTV is becoming an integral part of the IT infrastructure and organisations must carry out regular and detailed auditing and penetration testing to ensure that they remain one step ahead of hackers, it is claimed.
Even where IT systems may previously have been secure, adding wireless CCTV may have rendered the whole network open to attack. Yet in most cases, the encryption supplied as standard by most CCTV manufacturers offers only basic levels of encryption. In addition, they are often incorrectly configured rendering them incapable of providing total protection.
Hence a study on wireless installations that make up the critical national infrastructure. The CNI includes finance, retail centres, local government town centre surveillance, public transport, utilities, internet service providers (ISPs), food and drink and pharmaceuticals plus the security services.
What they say
Sarb Sembhi of Loginet Solutions, a member of Eurim, the Parliament-Industry Group on IT, is carrying out the research, to be published later this year. CCTV manufacturer MEL Secure Systems is taking part. Sarb Sembhi says: “Security has become a major issue as an increasing number of wireless and IP-based CCTV systems are installed. They may be a cost effective alternative to hard-wired cameras, but they raise some serious issues, which are not being addressed by an alarming number of users. A recent survey carried out by RSA, the global IT security specialist, found that 31 per cent of wireless IT networks were unsecured. There is no reason to believe that this study will not report similar figures for wireless CCTV systems.” Sembhi adds: "Effective encryption for wireless as well as wired CCTV systems can prevent unauthorised access to real-time and stored images as well as denying access to the IT infrastructure as a whole. From what we have seen so far, MEL Secure Systems is one of the most advanced developers of secure encryption technology that will protect wireless CCTV installations.”
