Recently I’ve been revisiting some hardware hacking techniques. I purchased a Hydrabus and a standard SOIC-8 clip from DigiKey to assist with this task. For practice, I decided I wanted to attempt to extract the firmware from the same DVR system I experimented with back in 2015. Link to post.
After inspecting the circuit board, I found a flash memory chip on the back.
Some careful lighting adjustments revealed the chip was a Winbond W25Q128FV, which is supported by flashrom.
FYI, this is a rewrite of some work I did in 2016 and was previously hosted on my old blogspot account. In doing research for the rewrite, I found that several people had done largely similar work, but I have identified some new information, particularly the ability to format the disk drive by sending a post request.
Before the Internet of Things (IoT) took over, homes and businesses were watched by closed circuit cameras, and some did have LAN and WAN remote viewing. The WAN connection was not through a cloud system, but rather a direct connection to the IP address of the device. Unfortunately, given the price point of these devices, a lot of security corners were cut.