An awful lot of devices on the market for home automation have severe security flaws, such as hard-coded passwords (or no passwords at all!). To make it worse, it's hard to find information on the Internet about a device's security before purchasing, so it's easy to buy something only to find out that it's blatantly insecure.
This article suggests that the only option in this case is to return the device or throw it away:
So, if the device has no password, or you can’t change the password it uses, it’s always going to be vulnerable to attack. You’ll need to throw it out and buy a new one that was built with at least the ability to change its password.
I suspect it might be possible to reduce the risk by restricting access to my devices to certain remote IPs, although I'm unsure as to whether that would completely solve any future problems.
The product I'm interested in particularly is the Raysharp DVR, which allegedly uses hard-coded passwords and offers no way of changing the authentication credentials. What actions can I take to prevent unauthorised access while still being able to use the camera from outside my home network?
