Definition
Monitoring of physical areas via camera video feeds to deter, detect, and investigate unauthorized access and related security events.
How it works
Video surveillance uses digital cameras that stream to a video management system (VMS) or network video recorder (NVR) for live monitoring, recording, and retrieval. Recording can be continuous or event-driven using analytics (motion in regions of interest, line crossing) or external triggers (access denials, sensor alarms). Time synchronization aligns video with other logs, while health monitoring detects camera outages and tamper. Secure export workflows preserve integrity for investigations.
Considerations
- Plan camera placement and coverage to avoid occlusions and handle challenging lighting; select lenses and mounting to capture entry points and critical areas.
- Size storage and bandwidth for the intended retention period by choosing appropriate resolution, frame rate, and compression, and monitor capacity over time.
- Secure cameras and management systems with unique credentials, timely firmware updates, encrypted transport, and network segmentation to limit exposure.
- Address privacy and legal obligations with visible notice, role-based access to footage, and retention policies aligned with regulations and organizational policy.
- Monitor system health and build resilience with tamper and heartbeat alerts, recorder failover where needed, and accurate time synchronization for correlation.
Implementation perspective
Video Surveillance should be treated as a technical defensive capability rather than a product checkbox. In practice, teams should define the protected scope, the conditions under which the technique acts, and the observable evidence that demonstrates the intended behavior. For this technique, likely engineering context includes Digital Camera.
Use the technique to identify suspicious, unauthorized, or abnormal activity through observable evidence and repeatable analysis.
Questions to ask
- Which events, states, or artifacts must be observed for the analysis to work?
- What analytic logic, threshold, comparison, or signature turns observations into a finding?
- How are expected false positives, blind spots, and environmental variations documented?
- Who receives the result, and what action is expected when the technique produces a finding?
Evidence and validation
- Telemetry and data-source configuration records
- Analytic logic, thresholds, signatures, and version history
- Test cases demonstrating expected positive and negative results
- Alert, triage, escalation, and tuning records
Common failure patterns
- Required telemetry is missing, delayed, or transformed in a way that invalidates the analysis.
- The technique produces alerts without an accountable triage and response process.
- Detection coverage is claimed from product deployment without testing the relevant analytic behavior.
This implementation perspective is original Bare Metal Cyber educational content. It does not replace the official D3FEND definition or establish that a specific product implements the technique.
Technique hierarchy
Top-level family
Parent techniques
Direct child techniques
None listed at this level.
Artifacts and ontology entities
These relationships describe how D3FEND connects a defensive technique to artifacts or other ontology entities. They describe graph semantics, not a product certification.
Explicit technique relationships
Show inferred artifact relationship paths (1)
Offensive-technique relationships
These relationships are generated from D3FEND graph paths and are explicitly experimental. They should be treated as hypotheses for defensive analysis—not as proof that the technique prevents, detects, or removes an offensive behavior.
ATT&CK Enterprise (1)
Authoritative sources
- Open this technique on the official D3FEND website ↗
- Open the official ontology resources ↗
- CCTV Technology Handbook ↗U.S. Department of Homeland Security · GuidelineReference
- NIST Special Publication 800-53 Revision 5 - Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations ↗NIST · GuidelineReference
- ONVIF Profile S Specification ↗ONVIF · SpecificationReference
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