The Los Angeles Police Department has warned residents to be wary of thieves using technology to break into homes undetected. High-tech burglars have apparently knocked out their victims’ wireless cameras and alarms in the Los Angeles Wilshire-area neighborhoods before getting away with swag bags full of valuables. An LAPD social media post highlights the Wi-Fi jammer-supported burglaries and provides a helpful checklist of precautions residents can take.
Criminals can easily find the hardware for Wi-Fi jamming online. It can also be cheap, with prices starting from $40. However, jammers are illegal to use in the U.S.
We have previously reported on Wi-Fi jammer-assisted burglaries in Edina, Minnesota. Criminals deployed Wi-Fi jammer(s) to ensure homeowners weren’t alerted of intrusions and that incriminating video evidence wasn’t available to investigators.
The thieves are jamming WiFi systems and the comments on the article and on Lemmy seem to blame the victim for not being tech savvy. The bulk of Nest/Ring customers do so because the app is easy to use and the cameras easy to setup. By definition the victims are far less likely to be able to defend against this kind of jamming attack.
If the next step in escalation is to shut down the power to the house, will the victim be blamed for not having home batteries and solar panels?
Why not question the viability of WiFi systems in general? Has video ever been more than a deterrent to those scared of cameras? Fearless thieves who know how to deter the systems get free loot for their trouble.
Treat security like we did before 2010; improve physical security to defend instead of relying on deterrence.
Yeah, it’s not really a spike in burglaries so much as a spike in a specific tool being used in burglaries. Whether they use a brick, wifi jammer or a gun they were going to rob someone someway…
Or a hoodie. I’m not sure why it’s a big g deal to WiFi jam a video doorbell when you can also defeat it with a hoodie …. Plus that’s not a burglar alarm.
Whoever is peddling anything as a burglar alarm that depends on WiFi is the real criminal
Jammer also keeps people from getting a notification that someone has come into view on the camera. An away homeowner who sees a person coming through their front door can call the police. With no notification you don’t know until you get home and they’re long gone.
LAPD is recommending cutting back shrubbery and coordinating with neighbors for extended leave… As a Los Angeles native, neither of these things happen. After all, high walls make for good neighbors.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense.
I tried to get the formatting right, but oh well
Can’t go wrong with a german sheppard.
Until he gets bored and starts gnawing on the linoleum
That’s what the burglars are for.
While still hating this living dystopia, I do appreciate some of cyberpunk headlines we get.
That’s one of the reason I went with a PoE camera. Just make sure your network is isolated so people can’t connect to your internal network from the camera Ethernet cable.
Or vice versa, connect to your cameras from the rest of your network.
It doesn’t hurt to hide or disguise the cameras to make them difficult to spot. That way, burglars wouldn’t even try to find and break their server if they’re not noticed.
Nah, cameras should be very visible so burglars see them and just go to the next house.
deleted by creator
POE is where it’s @
Yes, he kicked down the Point Of Entry. Also, Power Over Ethernet is the best. It is known.
And here I thought someone was just saying they like path of exile.
Listen, it’s a series of short horrific stories and you need to sit down to read about these absurdities that Edgar Allen Poe has to relate.
Honestly though, I really do need to read more of his stuff. I’ve only read a few, but they’re incredibly good.
I was thinking Pillars of Eternity. PoE is always on-topic. :)
It’s even easier to cut the Internet cables going into a house.
If I had a PoE surveillance system I’d have it saving to a local server.
I got great pictures of the people breaking into my van. It did nothing to help catch them.
Well, if you got a license plate, maybe the police would pretend like they care.
A license plate for what?
The license plate of the thieves who stole from the van. Just one thief is probably a drug addict, more than one is a crew that likely has a getaway car nearby.
Thieves who use cars during thefts usually use stolen cars. Yeah, I was able to get a license plate of a car that dropped them off once, it didn’t seem to do much since it hasn’t stopped them from returning.
Well, it’ll hopefully help them connect crimes and nab those thieves eventually. It certainly doesn’t hurt.
At least with my setup, I get a notification from Unifi basically immediately if my internet/power goes down. With all my POE being run through my walls and attic as well, I don’t really have to worry about individual cables being cut.
At some point when I have enough money to consistently eat dinner again, I would like to get a secondary wan through a satellite internet provider specifically for when my main internet goes down.
If only there was a solution, I don’t know, a cable resistent to jamming the ether, something we could call ether-jamming-resistant-network, in short Ethernet
I know… I am just dreaming :-P
It’s easy to write snarky comments like this, but the truth is running cables isn’t easy, and in some cases simply not possible, at least if you don’t want the cable simply draped over the outside of the house.
Alternative is like… a single gigabyte of local storage on these things
That could just as easily be stolen
It depends how easy to reach the camera is, I can’t see a thief sticking around long enough to set up a ladder to grab the camera, for example.
If they’re setting up a WiFi jammer, a ladder wouldn’t be an absurd thought.
They’d have the jammer already set up, either in a vehicle or on their person. A ladder is much more conspicuous.
As a side business I consult and install security systems in small businesses and homes.
Literally none of them want the cable option, no matter how hard I push it.
The cost of running the cable and the time needed always is the dealbreaker.
Doesn’t matter if its insecure, they just want it to work now and be cheap.
It’s bizarre.
In my last apartment, I literally had to fight to get a DHCP/ethernet + EDGE (yes, really) connection installed.
They kept asking me why I want two 😅
wdym DHCP?
And what’s an “EDGE” supposed to be? I only know that term as the old mobile standard. I believe it was 1G or 2G?DHCP as in it’s an ethernet connection to a residential router that provides the device with connectivity details.
Normally this isn’t considered as secure as a bad actor can cut the power or connecting cables (e.g. If you’re using dsl) to kick your system offline.
And, yeah, my old security system absolutely had an old 2G/EDGE modem to connect and send basic signals (as a fallback, in case of the above power cutting scenario). Was great.
Sorry but I still dont quite get it. Your apartment gave you basically a network inside their residential sorta ISP?
At least in Germany, you are responsible for your own internet provider access and (at least to my knowledge) don’t need to jump through hoops to get something else because the house doesnt do it and it’s your problem.
So if you want a main connection with a WAN-fallback, you just buy a router (or modem router combo) that can do it.
Only exception might be something like coax-based internet but that’s a problem with the provider.
However, jammers are illegal to use in the U.S.
What is the point of adding this bit for an article about burglaries?
They should make burglaries illegal too!
Because jammers are not inherently burglary tools. It provides extra information about the technology in discussion.
They’re extra illegal!!!
Ostensibly harder to obtain when they’re illegal to stock and sell retail.
Same reason why you see folks in Japan and the UK obsessed with knife crime rather than gun crime. Obtaining a gun is more difficult to do legally, so fewer people carry them.
I wish that apps notified you when your camera has been unreachable for too long, but at least that’s a hint that a jammer may have been involved. Cameras won’t stop them, but a the best setups would rely on wires and hidden local and cloud storage for recordings and alerts.
A numbers of cameras tell the user when they go offline, but yeah, a lot do not. I have a HomeKit system that sends an alert when WiFi or power has been interrupted to the camera or the primary hub.
apps notified you when your camera has been unreachable for too long
The volume of false positives this produced would render the system significantly less useful.
Especially if X# of cameras are down
before getting away with swag bags full of valuables
So just look for the guy who looks like he’s just been to four different network admin conferences?
Bill, where did you get these 37 easy buttons?
Worked at an old job where one guy, that had access to the router settings, would disable the Blink Cameras so he could forge his time cards.
Owners ended up realizing the cameras would only be disabled when he was on shift.
I worked at Walmart ages ago and one of the overnight assistant managers would do this and then steal cash out of the cash office until he finally got caught.
That screen capture looks like the beginning of a rap video.
i know nothing; would a hardwired connection from the cameras to the router solve this?
yes, assuming the cables are inaccessible from outside. otherwise it would be easy to cut them.
If you are close enough to cut cables, they already have you on video.
Yes but the camera should be in a place that can’t be physically tampered with easily since someone could theoretically unplug the camera and plug into your home network and see all your computers or other devices as if they had stolen your WiFi password. A small risk but it’s better to hardwire it somewhere they would need a ladder to get to or get a camera system that connects to a central box inside the house.
Well, if it’s not on a WiFi network, it’ll be fine. CCTV is a great example of this. Just wire up some cameras, encrypt the harddrive and put it somewhere difficult to get to. Only way to disable all cameras at once would be an EMP. There are kits for a few hundred $ and all the data stays local
Yes.
This is one of those things I thought would always remain firmly within the realm of science fiction. Watching movies and reading books growing up, movies like “The Matrix” and books like “Snow Crash” and “Neuromancer,” I’d always be fascinated with high tech burglary. The idea that one could intercept communications, jam frequencies, or anything of the like, always just seemed a bit too out of reach for modern day criminals. And yet, here we are.
A jammer is less sophisticated than a crowbar. It’s not like the burglar designs it themselves. Nor are they hacking your network to gain access, they just shut everything down.
It’s actually not that high-tech… Like jamming a wifi signal is basically like just shouting over someone to prevent them from speaking (or at least from being heard). To make one from scratch, you need a little bit of technical prowess, but it’s definitely a beginner project… But to use one, you literally just turn it on, and maybe choose a frequency. They’re widely available and cheap.
There are pretty cool sophisticated digital crimes out there though, so take heart!
I would think most wifi jamming is just deauth attacks. It is much easier to just channel hop, enumerate clients, and send them deauthentication packets.
This way you don’t need a particularly powerful radio/antenna, any laptop/hacking tool with Wi-Fi is all you need. There are scripts out there that automate the whole thing, so almost no deep knowledge of wifi protocols are required.
WPA3 has protected management frames to protect against this but most IoT cameras probably don’t support WPA3 yet.
That’s a relatively sophisticated attack though, and like you said is dependent on versions of WPA. It’s easier from a hardware perspective but more complicated software.
A 2.4 and 5ghz jammer is just simpler. Turn it on, everything fails. Even stuff that doesn’t talk Wi-Fi like Zigbee. Throw 400 and 900mhz on there too and now even residential security sistems will be frozen. It’s just simpler to use brute force for something like this.
Its like laying on your horn to stop people from hearing each other. Low tech.
Sick, where do I get those jammers?
I’m not gonna rob anyone, I just don’t want cameras working nearby me.
You do realize it stops wifi in general from working, not just the cameras
It doesn’t even stop the cameras, which would continue to record and save in their SD cards locally.
Ones that have that feature. Some popular cheaper brands (e.g. Ring) the individual cameras can’t support SD cards but the base station can but they need wifi to be able to do that.
Ring is not a cheap camera. The $20 Chinese cloud cameras sold on Amazon are extremely common and they all have MicroSD card slots as a backup option.
If I’m out in the world around unfriendly cameras I’m probably not on Wifi anyway. And yes, I know all the reasons they’re illegal, this isn’t completely serious.
Smash microwave oven window and you got a very powerful jammer
Hey it tickles
If a burglar is using a wifi-jammers then the basic consumer is not going to be able to stop said burglar. Basic consumer security products aren’t designed to do anything more than keep honest people honest. It’s much harder & more expensive to prevent a determined criminal from gaining entry and would likely require rethinking housing construction from the foundation up.
Its also to help police with investigations. POE cameras and doorbells won’t have this specific weakness, they’ll probably still get in and steal all your valuables, but if they think thier wifi jammer is working you might get some footage thats useful for the cops…
Then the burglars will just upgrade to a device that sends an EMP to disable everything. If it’s worth it.
Hope they forget to put a fadaray cage around their cells.
My go to method for stealing people’s stuff is actually a neutron bomb. It keeps the property intact and all you gotta do is wait for a few months for the big gamma emitting neutron activated materials to cool off.
Wouldn’t that destroy all the expensive electronics they’re trying to steal?
Maybe they’re after GOLD
Sorry I forget people have other types of expensive stuff too. I’m usually only worried about protecting my Lucky Charms.
But then if they do realise you’ve got POE devices I guess they could use a laser to overheat the external cameras I guess, or nock out your power if you don’t have them on a UPS…
I highly doubt they’ll go through that much effort. If they do notice you have POE devices, they’ll probably just go to your neighbor’s house. And that’s the whole point of this type of security, be just a bit more secure than the next person.
Physical locks, physical keys. We are collectively becoming too “smart” for our own good
Physical locks and keys are also easy to bypass.
Not sure how that’ll help with doorbells and cameras not working?
