What Are The Greatest Security System Vulnerabilities Installers, Integrators And End Users Must Consider?
What Are The Greatest Security System Vulnerabilities – What are the greatest vulnerabilities of any electronic security system?
A: Leaving aside user error and malicious insiders, power is the greatest vulnerability of any electrical system. The key to securing power supplies is redundancy and failure reporting, but securing electrical and comms infrastructure is way harder than it sounds.
Installers, security managers and system designers should pay a great deal of attention to minimising the vulnerability of wiring. Bear in mind as you carry out your installation that power and comms wiring are the weakest links in your system.
They cross from secure to unsecure areas, transit boundaries from walls into ceilings – the latter are unlikely to be fitted with detection devices – and in some cases they will go from one building to another via unsecure external environments. In some cases, you will be able to use existing cable infrastructure, but not always.
Another mistake is surface mounting completely unsupported sensor cabling for long distances across walls where it’s accessible. In instances where surface mounting of cabling can’t be avoided and chasing is impossible, use conduit and take the cable as high as possible, regardless of installation difficulty (within reason), or think about wireless links.
While high security sites use steel wire armour cables and grounded metal conduits, this won’t be an option in domestic and commercial sites – you’ll be using poly. Instead, ensure that cabling is kept out of reach and out of sight behind walls and on ceilings, under carpet in low/no traffic areas.
If you use poly conduit, bear in mind the cable run is still inherently unsecure and do your best to protect it with interlocking detection zones and covered approaches, supported by sensors or camera analytics. You can also take cables through walls and out of sight using shared cable ducts – much easier to say than to do.
Cable protection can also be facilitated at the control panel by ensuring sudden signal loss is registered as a priority alarm event rather than as a second-tier admin alert, especially if multiple devices are impacted.
In SME applications, installers should still pay attention to the security and redundancy of power supplies. In domestic and small commercial systems many security systems are installed beside a local wall socket in a lightly secured area and simply plugged in. CCTV systems are especially vulnerable to power disconnection – think about UPS – it’s affordable and it works.
Other threats include sensors and cameras that are within reach and can be blinded. Think about local jamming of wireless sensors, consider that many systems fundamentally depend on off the shelf network components that are certain to be messily configured and vulnerable to attack in layers. Quality installations will secure as much security system hardware as possible.
Other issues will emerge from poor product choice, poor installation technique, lack of maintenance and lack of internal system management – generally these are emergent properties of penny-pinching in one way or another. Cyber security also needs to be considered, as does the security profile of smart devices used as credentials.
As well as leading to unreliability, poor product selection is likely to feed into operational failure from day one – sensors with insufficient range, cameras with insufficient low light performance, access control systems that are expensive to expand, or with eye-watering card replacement costs, systems without the ability to deliver fast, targeted AI searches, etc.
Another big vulnerability is slow or no response to alarm events. This might be caused by lack of procedures, lack of professional monitoring and alarm response, or low patrol staff levels carried by security providers at vulnerable times – from 2am to 6am.
If there’s no reaction to intrusion for hours, or until the morning after the event when staff arrive, investing in target hardening might offer better material security than the use of electronics. End users should never forget that a security solution that generates no response is an investigation tool – nothing more.
You can read more about choosing electrical conduits here or read more SEN news here.
“What Are The Greatest Security System Vulnerabilities Installers, Integrators And End Users Must Consider?”
