Here is the winter holiday season and a lot of people travel and use apartments, hotel rooms, AirBNB etc. Hidden cameras and sound recording devices are small and stealthy. There is no way to be 100% sure that our room is not “wired”, but we can look around in the network if we use it and investigate our surroundings.
Let’s start with the physical security. After arriving, the first thing to check before even opening the bags is the investigation of bed sheets and the frame. Unfortunately even the best hotel rooms can be infected with bed bugs. Let’s look for bugs and their droplets carefully while our bags are safe in the bathroom (these insects hate the wet rooms). The last thing we want to bring home from a vacation is a bug infestation.
Then let’s check the locks on the doors, the emergency exit plan (it is usually a plastic card or paper on the main entrance). In case of emergency we want to leave the building as fast as we can, and we don’t want to be trapped.
If we found everything fine, then we can look around the different rooms and look for out of context items, broken image frames on the wall or small holes in the wall. There can be virtually endless places where small surveillance cameras and microphones can be hid, but we can narrow down our search for example with looking for items in unordinary/out of context places. There is a chance that we can spot the lens of a hidden camera if there is any.
In darkness we can look for small red or green lights in the surroundings. Most cameras with night vision use a blinking or constant light for their operation. We can spot it by naked eyes.
We won’t go through the online security here, follow my previous post about online security. We can use our forensics and testing tools for testing the network for IP cameras. There is a chance that a hidden camera will communicate on the same network with us. We must do it on our own risk because even port scanning is against the law in several countries. Do it on your own risk!
With NMAP we can look around the network and check the system for devices. On these devices the OS check and port scan can reveal their function. Some of the consumer grade surveillance cameras can be detected by NMAP scans.
If we are really aware of our privacy, then there are professional tools on the market for capturing the radio signals of these devices. The use of such tools may be prohibited in some countries, we must check it first. Use them on your own risk!
With the above we can achieve a basic security during our stay. It is just the top of the iceberg, we just scratched the surface of the topic, but it is a great start for the further steps. We must do our own research of the place where we go.
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