As you embark on your summer travel plans, have you ever wondered if there’s a hidden camera in your rental house? Most vacation rental properties have rules that restrict surveillance cameras indoors, so you should be able to rest easy, but have you ever wanted to double-check? As the summer travel season begins, we have some tips for you:
Sometimes low-tech is the best tech:
- Many cameras have a small light to indicate they’re powered-on, so start by looking for glowing spots or bright dots where they don’t belong.
- Cameras all have a lens, so cameras can often be spotted by shining a flashlight all around the room and looking for reflections, glimmers, or glares from glass lenses.
- Many Wi-Fi cameras provide night vision with infrared sensors. You can’t see infrared with your own eye, but if you turn off all the lights in a room and open your smartphone’s camera, infrared light sensors will often be visible on your screen as a cluster of small, glowing red or purple dots.
Now for the higher-tech options:
- There are many radio frequency (RF) detector devices for sale that claim to be “hidden camera finders” that may or may not work for you. They range in price from $50 to several thousand dollars. They scan typical WiFi frequencies and Bluetooth frequencies looking for activity and signal strength. They have some shortcomings: they may not be checking for the exact frequency in-use by a particular camera when it’s transmitting, they likely won’t find a wired camera, and they tend to show false positives since there’s so much wireless “noise” in the air these days from everything from microwaves to the cell phone in your pocket.
- If you have access to the wireless router’s admin page, you could look for the Connected Devices List or the DHCP Clients List. Make sure you can account for each device. You could always start unplugging things (including the wireless access point, router or modem), but the property owner might not appreciate your detective skills.
- Using your smartphone, you could attach to the wireless network and use an app like Fing to scan for other devices. Note that some routers don’t permit this activity and it may not detect devices on other wireless networks. It can also trigger some cybersecurity alarms, since network scanning isn’t normal behavior.
Most criminals don’t want to be found, but there are signs of amateur unauthorized network use:
- Unusually slow Internet speeds, indicated by repeated buffering, delay, or “no connection” errors
- Frequently being disconnected from WiFi
- Router traffic indicator lights flickering when all WiFi devices are turned off
Have a question about this, or a tech tip you’d like us to cover? Contact Pegasus and let us know.
