[autoexec]

Why not a physically separate network? If all you care about is catching outside problems like porch pirates, car thieves, and dogs owners who don't clean up after their pets just run cables from each camera to a switch that's connected to a single machine that isn't on your network or the internet.

Cameras inside the house get internet access, so intruders can't just walk off with your footage, but external camera feeds are fine to be stored locally.

That'd take very little skill to set up, prevents anyone from using those external connections to get at the rest of your network or abuse your internet connection,you don't have to worry about jammers, the police won't be accessing your feed whenever they feel like it, and Amazon won't be keeping detailed logs of everyone who comes to your door, how often you have company over, what your daily/weekly schedule is like, how often you get food delivered, what kinds of clothing you and your guests are wearing, how many children are in your home, how many pets, how often you go out on the weekends vs staying inside, how often you vacation and for how long, how many friends you have, how often you have non-amazon packages delivered, what kind of car you drive, etc

[bluedino]

Put enough voltage through the line and you'll destroy the switch, ethernet cables, and possibly other network devices that are connected.

[autoexec]

Pour gasoline over the cameras, then light it, and you can burn the whole house down destroying the footage and killing everyone inside!

You can't build a system that's immune to every possible type of attack, but fortunately you don't have to. Most people will never catch a single "bad guy" with their camera set up, and will never have anyone mess with the system at all. That doesn't mean it's not a good idea to take a few simple steps to better protect yourself, your family, your packages, your network and your privacy. If you see value in having your surroundings captured on camera you can gain a lot of benefits for a small amount of effort by throwing your ring cameras in the trash and setting up a dedicated network for their replacements.

[bsenftner]

This is the way to go. Any other way is just lazy.

[ryandrake]

I take the lazy VLAN route, then. Ideally, I can plan all this out during construction, and run conduit through all walls, have electrical outlets near each ideal switch location, and so on. But in most homes that are not previously owned by tech-geeks, re-wiring properly means busting down drywall. If you own the home, it's a major pain, and if you rent, it's impossible.

Typically the things on my home network that need to be isolated and/or revoked Internet access are not in physical proximity with one another, so using a separate switch for them means a lot more wiring. It is much simpler to just run devices to the nearest already existing switch and do the isolation in software. This also cuts down on the number of switches which means fewer points of failure.

[autoexec]

Because we've already got the skills to secure a shared network I don't blame you. On the other hand though there's some benefit to redundancy too. if your switch dies it'd be nice to be able to take the cameras offline and swap in the working switch so your internet stays up while you wait for the new one to arrive.

For the crowd who can't isolate the cameras from the rest of their network and don't already have a bunch of networking equipment laying around though a dedicated network for the security cams is a easy solution that offers a lot of advantages over a ring cam.