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Recently while browsing using shodan, I came across a search string to explore webcams.

Some of the searches I carried out were:

webcamxp city:city name

webcamxp geo: longitude and latitude

which exposed some public webcams.

This raises two questions:

Does private webcams/public {for e.g my corporate} to be accessible under these search engine? If so, how could I protect it from these kind of crawling?

There were several good answers to prevent router crawling under these questions. How can I protect myself from shodan?

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BlueBerry - Vignesh4303
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  • Shodan is designed to find services and information which are not properly protected. If you do not want your webcams to show up, you should take proper protections like firewalls, VPNs, authentication, etc. You need to clarify what you mean by private/public as those are usually contradictory concepts - you can't make something public and expect it not to be found; however, you can make its presence known but access difficult. – Eric G Jun 26 '15 at 15:44

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The same exact rules apply to webcams as in the thread you referenced. If you put your webcam on an obscure port (not just 8080 or a common variant) then Shodan will not find it while crawling. If you keep your webcam protected from anonymous access (set unique user/pass settings for all accounts on the cam) then outsiders will not be able to see it even if they do come across its presence in Shodan. Also, keep your device firmware up to date in order to prevent possible vulnerabilities from exposing it.

Really, these protections are nothing that you shouldn't be doing already. Shodan in one sense is barebones audit tool; if your gear shows up there you are REALLY doing it wrong. Webcams show up on Shodan for one of two reasons: the owner/operator doesn't want them to be private at all, i.e. traffic cams or public park weather cams, or the owner/operator is really not following ANY security guidelines and leaving their cam both in plain sight (on normal ports) and wide open (default credentials or no credentials at all).

Jeff Meden
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