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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

If I were a burglar and would see Nest or other smart-home stuff in the Bluetooth device list... well here's someone who fancies technology and might be worth a try.

To make stuff even better: forcing the Dropcam to disassociate with the owner's wifi network and reassociate with my own? Take a RPi, a 3G dongle, a battery pack and throw it into a nearby bush... perfect to stalk out when the home owners are not there, and thanks to the 3g connectivity no one will even have to look around and arouse suspicion with neighbors.

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Actually if you were a burglar you'd likely be a teenager out for the thrills or a drug addict and the most you'd do is see if anyone or a dog was home before kicking in the door.

Burglary rates have cratered not because of security systems but because people don't have things that are easy to trade for cash.

Unless it's jewelry, cash or guns it has virtually no value sold hot.

Stolen documents are a goldmine to identity thieves.

Easier ways than a B&E

Depends on whose documents you're after

What percentage of identity theft is the result of burgled documents?

The lost credit card number, whether from a wallet or a web site.

Not sure, but a stolen (some say give away by disgruntled postal carrier) USPS key was used to break into dozens of mailboxes in a very affluent zip code in San Francisco (Nob Hill and Russian Hill).

It must have been very lucrative for the pair of thieves. Also scary that a single key works across an entire zip code.

being a drug addict isn't mutually exclusive with having other skills. I wouldn't have been above something like this if my salary (software engineer) hadn't been able to cover my habits.

Granted. This wasn't a commentary on who is likely to have the skills, it was a commentary on the value of time. If you can pull of electronic surveillance you can make a lot more money doing that than B&E's.

Teenager and "person who would hack your security camera" strikes me as having lots of overlap.

I don't know much about Nests, but does simply being on the same wifi allow you to see what the camera sees? I thought they uploaded stuff to the cloud (I assume over https) so you would have to compromise the cloud account to see anything.

I have a Nest camera. You're right, being in same VLAN does not give you access to video feed (at least via http). You need to view it online from their cloud.

Can you check if it is uploading a fixed or variable bitrate video? (Ie. does the bitrate change if there's no activity within the camera's FOV?)

Yes, the bit rate changes based on how much motion is in the cameras field of view.

It maxes out at about 1.5Mbps (1080p high motion)

Somehow having to access it from a Nest server, and hence have it be copied by Nest, does not inspire confidence. I'd be much more worried about someone looking at me via Nest than a burglar subverting my Nest camera.

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