Any CCTV system with enough eyes and fair stability & availability will be very effective deterrent against unorganized, opportunistic, impulsive, hot-headed and petty crime or undesirable acts committed by vandals and ordinary citizens, but the same may not hold true against organized crime where you need additional measures to make the system robust. So before we charter into this territory first think if your requirement is to curb un-organized crime or organized one and read the rest of the post only if you feel the need of additional protection against sophisticated and organized vandals.
If you want to make a very robust system, you have to first get into the mind of AND think like a vandal or criminal looking to commit the crime. A CCTV system is like Human body sensory organ sub-system viz. eyes (+ears), optic nerves & brain. To defeat the CCTV system it has to be deactivated before or made in-accessible at least after the crime is committed. A skilled vandal therefore can resort to one or more of the following tactics:
(1) Blind the CCTV system (cameras) before committing crime.
(2) Impair the communication mechanism between the eyes and brain (recording system) *before committing crime
(2) Impair the brain of CCTV system *before committing crime
(3) Destroy the contents of the the brain *after committing crime or run away with the brain.
The above objectives can be met by either physical and non-technical actions, or by cybersecurity breaches. A vandal who does not follow the above *before and *after tactics, will likely either be caught on camera committing the crime or leave enough circumstantial evidence for law enforcement to get him into the investigation net.
And so our objective is to make it difficult (if not impossible) for him to do so, if we want to make our CCTV system robust. Its like an arms race. Lets see how this can be achieved in *abstract terms.
(a) Two eyes are better than one. 4 better than 2. More so if one eye watches the other. Do not think having one camera or a camera on main door is enough to deter crime inside the home. You need to have few inside, few outside at different locations, cameras on opposing diagonal room corners is even better, so that it becomes difficult to bypass system by compromising one camera. A good camera density is a must so that its impossible to erase *all traces of circumstantial evidence even if *clinching evidence is erased. Less is not necessarily the best.
(b) Another way of blinding the eyes is to smoke them by cutting fuel like power. If cameras are supplied power from a common source and that source is cut, then the eyes stop working. If camera is not on UPS and power is cut, the cameras all go down together and it does not matter if you have one eye or four. Therefore making it hard to reach common power source, distribution of power sources, redundant sources (Emergency Battery backup + UPS + Utility/DG supply) all help as counter measures. In case a common source is used, the common source itself can be watched by an eye, so that the act of disruption leaves a trail of circumstantial evidence.
(c) If a breach like above does happen, it may help if extra countermeasures are deployed. For that incidents like multiple cameras going down together can trigger notifications/alarms that alert the system owner and he can initiate manually a sanity check and any extra safety measures.
(d) The communication mechanism between eyes and brain could be the network. That network can be wifi or wired or cellular. Wireless signals (wifi or cellular) can be jammed, but this is a sophisticated cyber attack beyond the reach of an ordinary vandal. Wired networking can be disabled by cutting either cutting the networking cables and/or networking equipment or the power . Power we have dealt above, but typical counter measures for securing wired networks is not exposing cables (retrofit installation is weak), Putting cables in rigid conduits, junction boxes and not exposing any part, Securing networking switches just like power sources, obscuring the raceways/conduits by mixing them with others (at cost of maintainability), etc. are all strategies that are useful in deterring the vandal. If their is dependency on Internet access (cloud storage), having redundant internet connections can improve the vandal resistance as it *may get difficult to cut 4 connections together, and where the cabling is together the area should be on CCTV coverage also.
(e) The brain of the camera can be on-board SD card, an off-camera but on premise-recorder, or Cloud storage. A cloud storage is very hard to tamper (governed by rules, no single person control, democratic governments, geographical redundancy, etc). the only way you can compromise it is my keeping is so less that before the crime is detected, the footage of it is overwritten. It will however be helpful if cloud storage is augmented by an on-premise storage in either camera SD card or NVR/File-Server/BaseStation. Similarly having duplicity of storage in home such as both on camera and on NVR/File-Server/BaseStation etc is helpful if cloud storage is not used. Another tactic is to hide the Recording device and make it harder to access (lock it, put at height, cover by camera footage, etc), so that attempts to tamper with it (steal hard disk, cut power supply, etc) before and after the crime, cannot escape the eyes and brain.
(f) Lastly keep the methods deployed top secret. Many crimes are and will be committed with insider help. So if the vulnerabilities are known, the risks multiply. Which means we will not tell what all & how we have deployed these vandal resistant methods in our apartment complex ;-))
Despite all this you cannot make an unbeatable surveillance system. You can just make it harder to defeat, because a vandal will need to deploy many tactics together and in unison to do so. And if after all this you are still defeated, give credit to the vandal and accept fate. Its survival of the fittest and he clearly came out first in the arms race.
- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC-P3 Telecom Sub-Committee
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