Video surveillance systems offer a critical layer of protection for your property. When designing a surveillance system, a lot of thought goes into optimizing the protection of your property. But you also want to consider how you are protecting the cameras themselves and understand ways to prevent vandalism in your security system.
To protect against security camera vandalism, you should prepare for it on two levels:
- System design: while not focused primarily on vandalism, a properly designed video surveillance system is well-protected for just about anything. By implementing a few fundamental design principles, your video surveillance system as a whole will already be largely resistant to vandalism attacks.
- System optimization: beyond the fundamentals, there are various optimizations to add an additional layer of vandalism protection; keep in mind that these optimizations are additions to, not a replacement of, a well-thought-out system design.
If you’re uneasy about setting up security cameras in an area with higher vandalism rates, or if you just want to make sure your security system is built to survive the toughest of attacks, keep reading to learn about security camera vandalism and how to prepare for the worst.
Common Types of Security Camera Vandalism
There are many different ways that someone could vandalize your security system, but for this post, we’ve boiled it down to a few main categories:
- Physical damage
- View manipulation or obstruction
- Data destruction
- Electrical interference
- Cyber attacks
Physical Damage
The most common form of security camera vandalism has to do with physical damage to the camera. Most often this involves smashing the camera, breaking its lens, or pulling the camera out of its mount. If a security camera is easily accessible and a trespasser comes onto your property with a baseball bat, there’s likely a good amount of damage that can be done. You can read more about weather resistance and vandal resistance ratings here. We recommend using cameras that are fully IK10-rated to help protect against these attacks.
View Manipulation or Obstruction
Not all vandalism results in permanent damage to your security cameras. Sometimes criminals use a variety of methods to manipulate or obstruct the camera’s view for a limited period of time. This could be something as simple as manually adjusting the angle of a camera so that the criminal activity is out of view. It could also involve blinding the camera with a bright light or, yes, even a laser pointer. Even though these acts don’t necessarily involve physical damage to a security camera, it’s still a form of vandalism, as it renders your surveillance system useless.
Data Destruction
Vandals coming onto your property may not take the time to do anything to your security camera. Another way a trespasser can ensure that their activity remains unseen is to destroy any recorded footage from your security system. Whether it’s an SD card stored locally on the camera itself or a hard drive installed in an NVR or a DVR. If a criminal can access your stored data, vandalism to your security cameras is the least of your worries.
Connection Interference
A less common form of vandalism occurs when an attacker targets the systems that power your security cameras. Someone could shut off the electricity, causing the cameras to lose power. Someone could find and cut power or network cables, causing your cameras to lose connectivity. There are several different ways an attacker can disable your cameras by affecting the environment, without causing physical damage to the cameras themselves.
Cyber Attacks
While beyond the scope of this post, another form of vandalism to consider is cyber-attacks. If an intruder can gain access to your systems either by logging into your administrator account or by accessing a stolen device, they may be able to adjust your security camera settings and potentially delete your footage.
Protecting Your Security Cameras from Vandalism: Design vs. Optimization
A good system design is about more than just vandalism and is important for protecting against any point of failure that can occur.
When we talk about optimization, we’re talking about concepts like installing vandal-resistant cameras, installing your cameras out of reach, or using security screws. All of these concepts are important, and we’ll discuss them later on. But they’re only effective to a certain point. Optimizations might protect your cameras from simple attacks, but if someone really wants to vandalize your cameras, they will find a way. In other words, a well-optimized system is only as strong as the system’s design.
A well-designed system, on the other hand, focuses on broader concepts like comprehensive coverage, proper camera placement, redundancy, and more. While these concepts may not be directly tied to vandalism prevention, they’re fundamental to ensuring that your security system can do what it’s supposed to do.
Look at it this way. If you put all your effort into optimization, you’ll have a few very strong cameras. All it takes is one even stronger vandal, and your security system immediately has a vulnerability. But if you put your effort into system design, that same vandal can knock out a camera and you will still be able to keep your system running and your property protected.
So what does a well-designed video surveillance system look like, and what are some optimizations to implement on top of these systems?
System Design
When we talk about system design, we’re talking about everything that goes into setting up your security camera system before you even lay a single cable. This is everything from sourcing your cameras to planning the layout to figuring out which intelligent events need to be set up and where. This is a big job and is usually done in consultation with a team of experts.
A few core considerations for proper system design are:
- Coverage
- Camera Choice
- Redundancy
Coverage
Lack of coverage is one of the most common mistakes people make when installing a video surveillance system.
Think about it. If you have two security cameras installed above the entrance to your property and the cameras are facing opposite directions, then you have a wide field of surveillance. But there’s a critical vulnerability here: the space between the two camera lenses. If a trespasser comes and knocks one of these cameras out, they’re now happily out of view of the second camera and can carry on with their illicit activities in secret.
However, if you switch the placement of these cameras so that they’re at opposite ends of the entrance facing toward each other, you have the same wide field of surveillance without the same blind spot. A vandal can now knock out one of your cameras, but you’d have footage recorded with the other camera of this whole event. Now not only are they still on camera, but they have to make their way to the other camera, adding more work on their part and more time for you or for the rest of your security system to act.
Adding more cameras adds more complexity to your system, to be sure. But it also increases efficiency, reduces blind spots, and makes sure you continue to have coverage even after a vandalism event.
Camera Choice
Sometimes adding a third or fourth camera is a great way to increase coverage and reduce blind spots, but oftentimes adding additional cameras may be out of the budget. Sometimes you can increase the efficiency of your system by choosing the right cameras rather than just adding more hardware.
When it comes to increasing coverage, many types of cameras can help you achieve a wider field of view with less equipment.
- Fisheye cameras: With a full 360° field of view, you’ll be able to see and record footage of vandals approaching the camera from the front, left, right, or back. It will be much harder to sneak around a camera like this.
- Panoramic cameras: There are more and more panoramic cameras coming on the market at more affordable prices. Like a fisheye, these cameras capture a wide 180° or more field of view. Unlike a fisheye, these cameras use multiple lenses to record panoramic footage with little-to-no distortion.
- PTZ cameras: Pan-tilt-zoom cameras are a great way to record a wide, flexible area with a single camera. When you set up your PTZ with presets and patrols, it can routinely survey an entire property with variable zoom factors, ensuring that all of your most important hotspots are covered. These cameras can also auto-track certain subjects, allowing them to keep people of interest in frame wherever they go. (Keep in mind that PTZs work best in tandem with wider lenses, so that as the camera zooms and pans, you still have wide coverage on another camera.)
Redundancy
As we’ve already mentioned in this post, if someone wants to vandalize your cameras, they’re going to find a way to do it. The goal of a well-optimized system is to prevent vandalism. However, the goal of a well-designed system is to prepare for vandalism. And redundancy is the best way to prepare for the unforeseen event that your cameras start getting picked off one by one.
First, you’ll want some sort of field of view redundancy. We’ve already mentioned that you should have comprehensive coverage of your property with no gaps and no blind spots. But now let’s take this a step further. It would be even better if you could have overlapping fields of view between your cameras, allowing you to continue to view a good portion of your property if individual cameras start going out.
Second, you’ll want some data redundancy for your recordings. Many security cameras have onboard storage options by way of an SD card inserted into the camera itself. This is a quick and easy way to record footage, but it’s also the least protected. If you record footage to the camera’s SD card, it’s a good idea to incorporate redundancy by either recording to a dedicated video recorder or a cloud storage solution. Verkada’s hybrid system design has onboard camera storage in addition to cloud data storage. With the added reliability of local storage, hybrid cloud cameras are uninterrupted in the event of network outages, making them more dependable than cloud-only cameras.
By recording your footage with an onsite video recorder, either a Network Video Recorder (NVR) for IP systems or a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) for analog systems, you’ll still have access to your footage even after a camera is destroyed, potentially allowing you to capture footage of the attacker. Even better, some larger NVRs have RAID capabilities, allowing you to further back up your video recordings across multiple hard drives, in the instance that a single hard drive in your recorder goes out.
However, if the trespasser can break into your facility and find your video recorder, they’ll still be able to destroy any video evidence of their crimes. Verkada cameras protect against this type of attack as all footage is stored on the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere.
System Optimizations
A well-designed system by default has various built-in fail-safes to allow for a certain level of failure. You should always start with strategic planning and system design fundamentals before moving on to system optimization. However, once you have a strong video surveillance system design, some further optimizations will add a layer of protection to your security cameras. Below is a list of common optimizations to consider when deploying your security system.
- Prioritize vandal-resistant technology: Commonly referred to as “vandal-resistant domes” or just “vandal domes”, cameras with plexiglass dome coverings offer much more protection from vandalism. When looking for vandal-resistant cameras, make sure you source cameras that are fully IK10-rated.
- Make cameras as difficult to reach as possible: Those bullet cameras that can easily be grabbed and turned around need to be well out of arm’s reach. Make them so annoying to access that a criminal would rather move on than climb up to disable your camera.
- Invest in high resolutions or cameras with zoom: The higher you install your cameras, the less accessible they’ll be, but also the less detail you’ll get in your footage. To combat this, be sure to get your hands on 5MP or even 8MP (4K) footage. Your images will have greater detail and you’ll be able to digitally crop in on the image without losing much definition.
- Use strong screws: Use good quality screws, some tough anchors, and make sure your camera is next to impossible to pull out of place. For a bonus, pick a screw with an unusually shaped head. You don’t want any passerby with a standard Philip’s screwdriver to have the ability to unscrew your camera.
- Hide your cables: Most security cameras have holes cut out of the base to make room for the cable so that you can string it outside the camera and along the wall, wherever it needs to go. Do not fall for this trap! Do not expose your wires.
- Set up tampering alerts: With some modern security cameras, you can set up alerts for various events, from line crossing to pixel-based motion detection. A common event you’ll see is “tampering,” which will trigger an alarm anytime the camera is jiggled or tampered with. If someone does attempt to vandalize your camera, you can at least receive proper notification so that you can take the appropriate next actions.
- Use active deterrence cameras: Having cameras with flashing lights and loud sirens is a great way to scare off potential intruders. If it doesn’t scare them off, it will at least draw attention to the area from other people on the street or at nearby properties, and can alert individuals that something is happening.
- Be prepared: If vandalism is a real concern for you, then you need a plan. It won’t be helpful for you to receive tampering alerts on your mobile device if you don’t know exactly how you’re going to handle it once the notifications come through. Having a rapid response protocol in place will help you to act calmly in an otherwise scary situation.
Final Thoughts
If your system is designed from the ground up to handle certain contingencies, and if you fully optimize your security cameras for prime performance, vandalism is more of an inconvenience than anything else. As long as you’re prepared for these threats and follow the protocos above, they will not be able to fully disarm you.