Growing awareness of Chinese government-owned IP camera brands and their major cyber security vulnerabilities prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to recently pass H.R. 5515, a bill banning the use of Chinese government-controlled brands Hikvision and Dahua products in U.S. government facilities.

Daryld Karloff, Executive Vice President-Building Services for Baker Group, says, “It’s been proven that these relatively inexpensive IP network-based security cameras have already mined huge amounts of data – not video, but data – from business networks and transmitted it back to China.”

If in the next few months the bill is also approved by the U.S. Senate, companies that OEM or resell Dahua and Hikvision products will be banned and removed from U.S. government facilities. These include ADT, Stanley, Tyco/JCI, Honeywell, UTC and many others. More comprehensive lists of impacted brands are available for Hikvision at https://ipvm.com/reports/hik-oems-dir and Dahua at https://ipvm.com/reports/dahua-oem. 

“Brands that are not affected include Avigilon, Axis, Hanwha, Sony and Arecont,” says Karloff. “If you have any of these products in your facility, we can help to isolate them from your business network or create a plan to replace these devices. We work hard to select vendors that align with our values and ethics,” he says.