A free, brand-aware CCTV network scanner / auditor. One program to scan for all CCTV devices regardless of manufacturer.

Hi all. One of the challenges in my neck of the woods is the number of sites that will call you and ask you to take over an existing CCTV network. These places get so crusty over the years with different brands from one upgrade to the next and little to no working knowledge of what equipment on the walls is actually online. The problem is every manufacturer and every ecosystem is as closed-source, closed-door as possible. Not all NVRs can find all out-of-brand cameras, even when they're plugged right into the back of said NVR. At a new site we end up using a combination of IP scanners and a multi-pack of vendor tools until we work out what all is up there and it can take a long while.

We've been working on a pair of free and open-source utilities which have been made with brand-awareness in mind. CCTVSee and CCTVPeek. Feel free to check out our progress so far, and write us to report false positives or any crappy behavior. We don't have an infinite lab budget for testing, but we aspire to offer a very useful tool.

This thing can do the following, for about a dozen brands with various levels of auditing power:

• Figure out which devices on your network are CCTV
• Identify brand and mobile app ecosystem
• Determine activation status (for some devices)
• Pull mobile app register codes (for some devices)
• Find some "lost" devices, even with misconfigured IPs

You can plug your laptop into multiple different networks and scan under a variety of different conditions.

You can also use your mobile phone to control it over a tiny built-in web service; we really wanted to do a separate Android app, but your mobile just phone can't do the different kinds of scanning we can do using a Windows or Linux computer.

Please message us here or email us directly with your feedback (and -d logs where you're comfortable sharing). I'm not going to post a link in my intro post; the interested can look it up.

- The CCTVSee Project

CCTVSee can make mistakes! Email us with a clear explanation of what went wrong - we promise to take a look.

Oh yeah: it identifies at least some things about Hikvision, Dahua, Axis, Vivotek, Hanwha, Xiongmai, some of those pesky Xiongmai custom hybrids that speak fake Hikvision protocol, Reolink, Uniview, and others. Some brands are more chatty about their critical information than others. Creating this software has taught us we prefer some of these brands over others for their different security-convenience compromises.