D-Link IP camera hacking.

Recently I got my hands on a few Dlink cameras, specifically the DCS-930L for $19.00 each on Black Monday sales.   Toying around with them, they are better than the China cameras even though they are  only standard def.  But they don't send my video back to China, so that is a plus!

I wanted to access the video streams and the Image streams for my own nefarious uses, as in images for my desktop at work, and to view the cameras from my phone when I am away to satisfy my paranoia that the Cats are not plotting against me with the garden Gnomes.

If you ask D-Link, the cameras can't do anything and you MUST use their software.  They lie, you can access it.


To access the video stream, use the following URL

http://username:password@192.168.1.1:80/video/mjpg.cgi 

if you want the audio stream....

http://username:password@192.168.1.1:80/video/audio.cgi  (Only about 30 seconds at a time)

to grab a simple single image shot use the following URL

http://username:password@192.168.1.1:80/image.jpg

Obviously change the username:password and ip address with your information.  the :80 is the port so if you have 5 of these like I do, you can do NAT routing and get all 5 visible through the firewall at the same time.

Do not expect a lot of video quality, they have tiny Circa 2004 cellphone cameras in them and they have awful low light capabilities.  but for as cheap as they are and are wifi..  well worth it.

I did have an issue getting them to work with WPA2-PSK, so I set up a segregated lan on WEP that can't access anything but the internet.  The chances of someone hacking my wifi are near zero,  I cant even get wifi signal outside the house.

What if you want a wide angle image? well find the cheapie magnetic cellphone lense kits on ebay. you stick on a metal ring and the lens sticks to that.  Voila! Wide angle and telephoto options.

So if you want some nice disposable and hackable IP cameras,  The DCS-930L is at a low enough price that you can hack away without fear. I need to try and fit one inside a old dome camera body to make them useable for outside under the eave.

Lastly, be 100% sure you change the admin password to something hard to guess and NOT a dictionary word.  when you put these on the internet or tunnel ports for the image and video you also open up the admin interface because D-link is dumb and does not use a different port for the video, audio, and image.  Also be sure to upgrade the firmware to the latest, there is a major bug in earlier firmware that allows someone to retrieve the whole configuration without authentication and the config file contains passwords in clean ascii.

If you want to secure these but use them as a webcam for public use,  put them behind a raspberry pi that uses wget to retrieve the photos and then re-hosts them up securely.  Plus you can use some processing on the raspi to clean up the image, add text overlay, etc....