I had one of those cheapo CCTV systems for a store of mine and, wow, how dreadful the software! Has anyone ever written some decent software that one could load up on the generic CCTV systems?
Indeed, it's a Java applet that drops a DLL? Horrible. Basically, you need a windows machine with the Java applet installed (isn't this obsolete already?). Say goodbye to any potential security.
Maybe check out Axis, they are a very well established (15 years) provider of cheap web surveillance cameras. They may have slightly better security due to this. I know some of their earlier firmware vulns were called out.
Zoneminder[1] is FOSS and pretty good, it's not pretty but very much gets the job done, and is fairly hackable.