Lateral Thinking

I bought a new doorbell, one of those fancy ones where you see the person's face on your phone. I plugged it in, and it worked! Then I connected it to our video recording box so it recorded the video alongside our other security cameras. This didn't work. It crashed the recorder. I tried various configuration options to find a fix. I tried upgrading the firmware, and fiddling with our network... nothing worked. The recorder would still crash. Did I mention that the doorbell and security equipment were all from the same manufacturer? It turns out the recorder was too old, so I bought a newer model. No more crash! But now the security cameras stopped working. Error: "Wrong password". I promptly messaged our security guy who originally installed our security cameras, asking for the password to said cameras. No reply to this request. Maybe he didn't want to lose a dependent customer?

I now had two options: 1) climb a ladder and reset my cameras, or 2) avoid all ladders and hack my security setup to get the security guy's password. I opted for the latter, the more fun option. After an embarrassing amount of time and various angles of attack which included guessing the password (only had 5 attempts), raspberry pi powered network sniffing, looking at salty AES hashes, and hopping on one leg while rubbing my tummy and patting my head, I learnt that our security system is as it should be: pretty secure.

I was stuck. My problem was that I was thinking too linearly and wasn't using my imagination. This is a problem we all face, especially as we get older. What I needed was a dose of lateral thinking, which I duly received in the form of a forum post which led me to the eventual extraction of our secretive security guy's password. You see, all of our cameras and related security equipment are kept up to date so we're not exposed to well known exploits. And this meant that unless I was some security researcher breaking into iPhones for some large national government (news flash: I'm not), I had no chance of ever getting my hands on that password. Unless that is, I had a helping hand from an anonymous lateral thinker on an internet forum, which is exactly what happened. Our anonymous poster suggested that, if the latest firmware's security is too hard to break, why not simply downgrade to a version that wasn't? Simply amazing. Downgrading the firmware on one of our cameras, using a security hole to download its encrypted settings, and decrypting and then extracting the plaintext password with the help of a HEX editor? That's just genius. Thank you anonymous forum poster, you saved me from climbing up any ladders, allowed me to gain full control over our security, and humbled me with your lateral thinking.