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[George.Smith]

Hello everyone,

Some Background

I've been doing some work for a local small business that wanted to set up D-Link cameras as security cameras around the office.  The man who owns the place is pretty technically savvy, but he ran into some problems setting the cameras up which is how I got involved.

Eventually the cameras got set up and the business owner was so impressed he had me install D-ViewCam on one of his PC's.  So far so good and everything is going great.

After doing this job the owner asked me to do some other network troubleshooting for him.  Long story short he has a T1 line coming in to some Cisco equipment that was set up by a company that has since gone out of business.  Unfortunately this means the owner has very little information on how his network is set up and let's not even talk about passwords for his routers or access points.

My Problem

To do some network mapping I was using my laptop with BackTrack Linux on it to go poking around the network.  I found what I was looking for (which is unrelated to the cameras), but while I was doing my job the owner asked if I could do some snooping to see what I could find.  Now, I don't offer penetration testing as part of my services because it's not an area I'm an expert on and I let him know that.  He asked me to look anyway, so I told him I'd run a basic test on the network to see what I could see.  The owner's motivation is that his small business leaves their WiFi open as a courtesy for their customers so anyone can jump on so he would like to know what trouble someone could get into.

Here is what I did:  I ran the program Ettercap, selected unified sniffing, did a scan for hosts, turned on ARP poisoning, and hit *start sniffing*.  Take a guess what I saw on the network?  I saw all the usernames and passwords for all the cameras being broadcast in clear text on the network.  Nothing fancy needed, just read them off the screen.

Please tell me there is a way I can encrypt or otherwise secure this traffic!  I don't see an option in D-ViewCam software for any kind of secure connection and I've gone over the manual a few times but again didn't see anything.  The small business I'm doing work for lets people who visit use their WiFi for free, there is no password on the network.  The WiFi and the Ethernet are not segmented from each other (actually this is a very unsecured network in general, which concerns me).  The original installers just made everything one big open network.  While I have no way to change any of the settings on the existing router or switches (their passwords vanished with the company when it went out of business) I do have access to the D-ViewCam machine as well as the cameras.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[TimSRQ]

You asked a great question.  It would be great if someone answered this or let us know what we could do for better security.