Unsafe Nanny Cams – Recovering Lost Data is Easier with a Good Backup

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Transcript

TTWCP-DAILY-63_2017-04-12_Unsafe-Nanny-Cams

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/12/2017

Unsafe Nanny Cams – Recovering Lost Data is Easier with a Good Backup

Craig Peterson: Hi Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. We’re going to talk a little bit about backup today. World Backup Day was just, what, a week and half or so ago. I talked about it on my radio show. We never got to do it here on the podcast. So we’ll talk a little bit about that here. As well as our scary story of the day I guess here. Whew, man. Nanny cam owners. We’ll talk about that as well. Stick around. A whole lot of sanity checking coming right up.

(TTWCP EARWORM)

Well you don’t have to have children in order to have a nanny cam. There’s a lot of uses for them. I’m putting one up, in fact, on my beehives so we can watch them while we’re way. And you can watch them too. We’re going to stick it up on the website. You can watch our bees go in and out as they’re busy all summer long. And then winter is going to be kind of boring. But I guess you get to see when it snows and stuff here in the Northeast. But nanny cams are used everywhere. They’re security cameras. There are all kinds of things that are tied into the Internet. And the part of what we were concerned about is the security cameras. Now we have a number of them installed for our clients. We typically are using the Cisco and the Meraki devices here for really good security. And you know, it’s got all the automatic stuff in it. So it recognizes when someone walks up to the door or when they’re in some particular area, records it and let you review whenever there is any sort of movement or activity in the areas that you defined. They’ve gotten so far advanced but for the most part they haven’t gotten much better.

One of the reasons I love them Meraki Gear is that it automatically updates, right? Meraki comes up with new releases that have new features too, by the way, and gives them to everybody. Pushes them out. You know you’re safe. You know it’s always up-to-date. But that’s not true with 99% of the other vendors out there. Because the other vendors are making their software. They’re putting it in firmware and they’re shipping it. We’ve seen this again and again where there is a default password on the device. And, you know, that’s all well and good when you’re trying to do some real basic stuff. Or you’re trying to just do some testing, which I’ve had to do before right? I’ve built-in kind of backdoors like that so that we can test them during the alpha stages. By the time it gets around the beta, you’re supposed take those things out. By the time it gets around the beta, you shouldn’t have wide open doors into these things.

So they ship it. It shipped with the firmware and the odds are as I said about 99% that that firmware will never be updated on that device, on that nanny cam or security camera or lightbulb. Look at all of these things out on the Internet of things. So if you have something with a problem you might not ever know and some of these as well. We have a client that hired a firm to come in and put in some security cameras. And another one put in some video equipment to play videos, promotional videos and stuff. And what a nightmare both of those are. You know they had to go out to the web. And they were going out to the web all of the time and so many of these nanny cams are out on the web as well. Think about it. If you’re looking at your nanny cam, where are you going? You’re not connecting directly to the nanny cam. I can almost guarantee that. Or you are not connecting directly to your security camera or your security camera system. You’re going out to the Internet which means what? It means your camera is tied in to the Internet right? You had to set it up with Wi-Fi remember? Or you had to hardwire it in and then have that connect to the Internet. That’s what you had to do.

So those devices now, if connected to the Internet, are potentially hackable. It depends, but one thing is for sure. There is some thing out on the Internet that it’s connecting to, right? It’s connecting to a server that you later on can connect to to watch that video. Well, if they’re not in the security business how good do you think the software is, and the security is, on that server that your security camera’s connecting to or that your nanny cam is connecting to. The odds are excellent that it sucks right? So you’ve got devices out in the field like this nanny cam, that have never been updated, who are connecting to a server and that server has limited or no security. And you add all of this up and you can end up with a problem.

So here’s a story that came out of the UK. This woman wanted to check on her 14-year-old lab named Amber. And Sandy, that’s mom’s name here, got a nanny cam from her son at Christmas and used it to check up on her throughout the day. Well, one day, she could login from her cell phone which means what? It was connecting to the website and instead of seeing her lab Amber, she saw a sleeping baby. So she said, oh wow. I don’t know here. So what you normally do, well you reboot right? So in her case, she logged out of the app. She logged back in she still saw the baby. So she contacted the media, let them know about it and really everyone should be aware of it. That this sort of thing can happen. People could be watching through your nanny cam. And I had this question. I was being interviewed on TV news and the reporter was asking, why would I be concerned? Why would I care? You know there’s the obvious thing of you probably don’t want them seeing you prancing around in your underwear, alas, right? But the more concerning thing to me is your privacy because now they know they can listen in. They know when you’re going on vacation because you’ve been planning it right? And the microphone is on. So they know when you’re home because they can look and see wait a minute there is no movement in that house and by the way this never any movement in that house. They don’t have to sit across the street in their car and watch your house anymore. Now all they have to do is log on to the web server and watch what you’re doing. Hack the web server. How about you giving out your credit card number over the phone? Guess who else heard that? Your nanny cam.

So this is really a dangerous thing people are inviting into their homes. Now, I don’t have any of these in my house. None of them. And I think for a good reason, I hope for a good reason, but as I said, I’m going to let my bees have one so we can we can watch the bees. I don’t know, I might aim it a little differently so you can see the horses and the chickens and stuff too. But I’m going to have a bee cam I think.

So let’s get on to our International Day of Backup before April Fools’ Day, March 31^st. And here’s some stats that I want everybody to think of because you know we all kind of think we’re invincible. We all kind of think that nothing’s going to happen to us. There’s nothing to worry about. Well backups, first of all, fail. So even if you’re backing up that doesn’t mean that you haven’t lost anything. Remember what I was saying yesterday with my basement and the flood and we lost the server and unfortunately the most recent backup had a file missing right? That happened to me. Now I had an other backup that was able to restore my data from. But you know, that that doesn’t happen all of the time. And I have clients that have been still, still to this day, insist on, have been insisting on using tape backup. I’m trying to think if anyone does it anymore. I think we got everybody off of it. We had a multinational, we still have a multinational client that was using tape backup until recently. Nowadays it’s disk to disk locally. And, by the way, not just a raid array but use where there you have a block level checksum so that you don’t get that bit rot. But that’s another thing that we can talk about later on.

But why should you backup? Here’s the stats. This is according to http:/WorldBackupDay.com. 30% of people have never backed up. I had a friend who was using external hard disk and was storing all of his photos to it and guess what happened? It died on him and he lost everything. All of the pictures of the baby that they had. Everything. It was just crazy. 30% of people never backed up. I know this is not you guys, so I’m not going to harp on this. 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute. Do you backup your phones? 29% of disasters are caused by accident, another big deal here particularly when you’re a business. There’s so many disasters that could happen. 1 in 10 computers, 1 in 10, are infected with viruses every month. They’re infected, they’re not attacked, they are infected.

So how should you backup? You can back up to an attached hard drive. And in that case if you’re backing up if you’re not storing your files on that hard drive but use it as a backup, you’re way safer. Because now you have two copies right? You have the one copy on your computer and the other copy on that attached drive. You don’t have everything on one drive. You can also backup to your USB drive and you can backup online and that’s what I really recommend. And we have a product that’s design for Apple Macintosh just because Apple has gotten out of the backup business and that product allows you to back up your Macs to a local machine. And then so you have a copy locally and then that’s pushed up to the cloud. So that there is now a remote backup as well. So that’s what I recommend doing. If you can, do a local backup to an external drive of some sort or network attached storage box and then make sure that pushes up to the cloud.

A simple way to start saving your files to the Internet is you can just subscribe to OneDrive, Dropbox, who have free by the way, levels. Google Drive has a free level. And Amazon Cloud Drive, I think they’ve got a free level but it’s pretty, pretty small. And you can back up the most important things that you’re working on right now by dragging them to those services. They integrate directly with finder on your Mac or Explorer on your Windows machine. It looks like almost like a local drive and it actually does keep your files locally and pushes it to the cloud, which is really, really good. But you probably should back up your whole computer and, you know, take care. Pay attention. This is a difficult thing. One of the things I’m working on right now is I’m putting together a product for businesses that goes through the details of all of this stuff because that’s one of the questions. I should have mentioned, I lost some your questions and I haven’t been able to respond to them because of again a bad back-up and the disaster. And me, being my computer, being the cobbler’s kid. My domain is the cobbler’s domain. So we… well long story but anyways. So I’ll be responding to those questions. But if you have questions about me and send them off. We’re putting together a whole kit. We’ll let you know as it’s done here, on security and the IT things you need to worry about as a business.

Have a great day. Make sure you subscribe, if you haven’t already, to my daily podcast as well as I’m including my weekend radio show heard on iHeartRadio Clear Channel. And I’m also including in that my appearances on radio so that’s usually three different appearances which cover, in fact, three states fully and a couple estates partially. Have a great day. http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Take care. Talk to you tomorrow.

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Show Notes:

If there’s one thing that would scare you today, that should be recovering lost data because of poor backup habits or services. Keeping your data safe is one thing, and backing it up is another, those go hand in hand regardless if you are a home office or an enterprise.

Also, as parents all we ever wanted is to make sure we get to watch over our kids and make sure that they are safe and sound. But, what if you are not the only one who is watching your kids? Or, what if you wanted to watch over your home and pets, and ended up seeing a different cam feed?

There are a lot to talk about today on TechSanity Check, and we’ll get all those fear off of your shoulders.

For tech and security related questions, send them over to me@craigpeterson.com.

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