Setting up e-mail notifications for the SecurityProbe camera
Security cameras made the news in a big way last weekend, when a security breach at the Newark Liberty International Airport led to the discovery that one of the TSA surveillance cameras had been broken for six days leading up to the incident. Six days! Now that gives a real sense of security in these uncertain times, doesn’t it? The breach, which authorities were notified of by an alert passerby, caused a 6-hour lock-down and possibly cost the airport over $100,000, according to a report in The Star Ledger. Thankfully, this breach apparently was caused by a man walking his girlfriend to her flight and not a potential terrorist, however, it certainly exposed the gaping holes in the security protocol at one of the busiest airports in the US.
I have no idea what sort of back-up notification system for camera failure the TSA has set-up, but after reading about the Newark incident, I wanted to find out what kind of notifications are available for cameras connected to the Ravica SecurityProbe. I played around with the demo interface that we have set up in our office and found that with the Notification Wizard there is an easy way to set up email (or voice or text. . .) notifications if one of the cameras connected to the SecurityProbe goes into a critical state, because it is broken or has been disconnected. The following is a step-by-step procedure for making sure that a broken camera in your facility never goes unnoticed.
1. Within the Ravica web-interface, click on the Notification tab and select “Begin Notification Wizard” from the menu on the right side of the screen.
2. Select the notification type that you want to set-up. Ravica supports almost any notification type that you could want from SNMP traps to sirens, emails to automated telephone messages. In this example, we’ll set it up so that an email is sent to the security desk whenever the surveillance camera goes into a critical state.
3. Enter the desired Action name, such as “Email Security Desk” and the email addresses of the individuals or groups that you would like notified when a problem arises.
4. You can customize the email text that will be sent. If you want, you can even attach a picture of the latest log or the current image on the selected camera.
5. The next few pages go through the SNMP settings and resend intervals that you would like to set-up.
6. Link the camera to the email action. Select the camera name in the Sensor column and make sure that “No Camera Signal Detector” is checked.
7. On the final screen, there will be a list of all the sensor notifications that are set up for the SecurityProbe. From this screen you can edit or delete an existing notification or create a new one.
That is all there is to it. Now the security desk will get an email anytime the camera loses a signal and the problem can be resolved immediately. Having a simple notification system, such as this, in place at the Newark Airport could have resolved the broken camera issue long before the breach occurred. It probably wouldn’t have helped out with the absent security guard, but that is a whole other issue. . .
~JessicaFollow Me on Twitter
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