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Comment by jamestimmins | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions Nmap as a way of identifying cameras on the network. Does anyone know how robust of a solution this is, or if there are other ways of ensuring that any cameras are found?

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Nmap can run a scan to find devices on the same network as your computer. It's fairly robust at detecting/identifying networked hosts. It won't find cameras that only record offline to a memory card and it won't find cameras that are on a different network (like if you're on a special guest network).

Edit: for example, my home network has an IP cam. So when I run the following to scan my home subnet:

    nmap 10.0.0.0/24

I get an output that includes:

    Nmap scan report for ipcam_00626E4E5B97_1.local (10.0.0.50)
    Host is up (0.023s latency).
    Not shown: 999 closed ports
    PORT   STATE SERVICE
    80/tcp open  http

From that I can deduce that 10.0.0.50 is a camera and serving some sort of management web page.

Not robust at all. It assumes that the person who set up the cameras and the network is basically just an amateur. Anyone with even a basic level of expertise in networking could architect their network so that cameras would be completely hidden from devices on whatever network guests would join.

An idiotic recommendation, but perhaps good for catching cameras placed by idiots. The cameras I’ve used aren’t even IP cameras.

The fing app would be a better, more widely available and usable suggestion. With the same downsides though.

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