This has always been a concern I've had around WiFi anything in security systems. Sure, they're great for easy installing in an existing structure, but between jamming and battery replacement, I've just never been a fan. I'm also old and don't trust anything, so that just adds to it.
I worried about this when installing 7 cameras on my home.<p>For what it is worth, more recent nest cameras have battery backup and buffer up to an hour of video if the WiFi is out (<a href="https://store.google.com/gb/magazine/compare_cameras?hl=en-GB" rel="nofollow">https://store.google.com/gb/magazine/compare_cameras?hl=en-G...</a>)<p>So in theory if the perps cut the power you are ok, and if they jam the WiFi you are ok too.<p>A month or two ago 3 guys actually did try to break in (without jamming) and the police took the videos but still weren't able to catch them. It gives me some.hope that perhaps one day maybe they do catch these guys and it serves as evidence.<p>I now have the cameras hooked up to Home Assistant so if they detect a person (and not e.g. a fox) and we are out, a Raspberry Pi starts playing loud barking noises and a few lights turn on. During our breakin attempt, the guys were on their 7th (!) attempt at kicking in our front door and you can see from the videos that within literally a second of a light going on (...when we woke up) they turned and ran off so signs of life from the inside seems to be a strong deterrent.
I remember the days before wifi routers came with randomized passwords. We walked around with a backpack that connected to open wifi, logged into the admin page with the default credentials, and changed the wifi name/password and the admin password.<p>We were evil kids and possibly part of the reason there are randomized passwords now.<p>Anyway, this is basically the same attack, just with a B&E and a lot more temporary. I'm actually most surprised that these devices don't appear to do any buffering when a connection is lost. And even then, the internet will not stay active if the thieves just go to the neighborhood junction box and pull the plug on the house.<p>:sigh: too much reliance on technology...
Been saying this for a while but the RF world is wildly under-explored on the consumer side. The military has been doing electronic warfare for ages but it's only now popping up in the consumer industry.<p>An example: all wireless protocols can be trivially jammed by just spamming noise, like anything else, but most can also be smart jammed by various methods: spamming disconnect packets, malformed packets that crash the device, noise jamming very specific parts of various transactions, like the alignment section of OFDM QAM on 4/5G, etc. This means, instead of needing some multiple of the targets transmit power to cover a wide area, you can use as much or less power than the target which is extremely bad from an EW standpoint.<p>We need to build smarter wireless protocols that can both resist casual assholes, but also higher sophistication adversaries up to and probably including nation state actors for the safety of our infrastructure.<p>And yes, that means insulin pumps probably shouldn't have radios in them.
Some car brands sell vehicles that open with a button push on the door, if the key is just nearby.<p>Standard kit now is you get an RF extender that bridges the distance from a key inside someone’s house to the car; then the car just lets you open it and drive it away. Much faster and simpler than the old slim Jim ways!
Recovery rates from theft are abysmal and expected return likely lower than value of the cameras. Arrest rates are single digit at best.<p>Burglary perps are primarily worried about a 9mm penetration to their skull by a $100 hi-point.
I always wished that a lot of home automation stuff would use powerline networking. Especially things like the relays I have on my lamps.<p>I guess an ESP8266 costs way less than all the chunky passives required to do powerline comms though.
My experience with cameras is as follows.<p>Flipping a house in gentrifying neighborhood. House burglarized a total of 3 times.<p>After first time, installed cameras covering every possible angle.<p>Both 2nd and 3rd time - They wore masks and did so in the early morning hours (3am-5am) Had several people case the house without masks. Either they didn't notice the cameras or they didn't care.<p>3rd time I had some choice words for the foe through my Video doorbell and let him know I would be there before the police and suggested he be gone before I get there. I got there in 10 minutes flat ready to beat him to a pulp with a tire iron.<p>I wish we instituted harsher punishments for thieves when they get caught. It may be unpopular opinion, but I am glad I have the right to kill someone and defend my property if I see fit if they're in a ski mask ready to take my things.
> Minnesota doesn’t generally have a reputation as a hotbed for technology<p>I don't understand why Minnesota is catching strays for a problem that affects the entire country. The hot new tech is the problem here, not Mark Tyson's cute naive northerner strawmen.<p>Companies like ADT hopped on the IoT bandwagon because it's cheaper and it gives the sheen of advanced technology. In reality, wireless security systems are far more vulnerable than their older, wired alternatives. You can jam them. They can simply drop connections on their own due to interference. Many of them rely on cloud services that introduce their own points of failure (that's not really Wi-Fi's fault, but with one form of bullshit usually comes the other).<p>Edina is notorious in the Twin Cities because it's where the old money lives - it's immensely wealthy compared to almost everything surrounding it. 100% of the blame rests on the companies taking rich-person home security budgets, and using it to install low-end Wi-Fi cameras. The victims here could certainly afford a wired solution, and I'd hazard a bet that they paid enough that a wired system could have been installed.
This gives me an easy solution idea. A few wired ESP32 in HA configured as a baysian sensor, if several or one goes offline someone's jamming or something is wrong.<p>Wifi canaries.
Seems like someone should make a wifi security cam that has several hours worth of internal storage to cache video when wifi is unavailable. Storage is cheap is hell. A 4GB micro-SD card adds like a dollar to the cost of a mass produced embedded system and could save a few frames per second for hours.
Is anyone else using the StalkedByTheState security system? It runs on Jetson SBCs and works with the full sized yolov6 and yolov7 models.<p>Super proactive detection and response<p><a href="https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install">https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-install</a>
I’m fairly certain that I have seen this in our hood. Basically someone or something will cause the motion detection to trigger, and then the video cuts out. Sometimes it goes black, sometimes it’s noise. In the most recent case it was someone whom I don’t recognize walking his dog and holding what I thought was a phone in his hand, and 3 different cameras did the same thing in order, going to white noise.<p>We didn’t get the cameras for security, we got them to watch the feral cats in the area to help catch them for TNR, but security is a nice extra, so we are considering replacing the Rings with something wired.
Earlier cameras did not have WiFi but used to have a local SD card onto which they'd record and overwrite. It would be dead simple (and inexpensive) to use such a camera with a buffer of a few days that would transmit using WiFi once a day or so instead of relying on real-time transmission. Wonder why these fancy solutions don't have such a simple mechanism but rely on an inherently unreliable medium...
Home security systems used to call out to the local response center using your existing phone line, you could jam the outbound call by tying up the phone line.
Don't see the point of security cameras. They don't prevent theft and if anything marks you as someone afraid of theft, thus wealthy enough to have goods to steal.<p>I am more afraid about a fire that would burn stuff and memories. I have offsite backups of my photos but I am not sure I would have the energy to go through all of them to reprint photo albums.
Wyze cheapo wifi cameras work so well. Of course it's a risk there, this is not the first time it's happening. What are the easy to use ip cameras, esp that I can power over POE? I want a cheap one too. I don't see how wyze can sell them for $30 (without poe with only wifi). Is there a decent $50 poe camera?
This is why it's important to ensure your cameras have redundant flash storage using something like an SD card. In this way, you have local footage on the camera whether it's jammed or not. So they'd have to tear the cameras down too, which is much more invasive than a simple WiFi jammer.
Lockpickinglawyer had a video about Simipfi's doorbell product a year or so ago, and I've been watching out for my neighbor ever since. She put up stickers /advertising/ the waveband her security is contingent around, and I'm just glad it hasn't failed yet.
It’s actually hilarious how easy it would be to catch the criminals if they don’t take extra precautions like wearing masks. Just have some fake wifi looking cameras in easy to spot locations and use wired real cameras.<p>Hardest part would be finding a consumer system that still uses hardwired cameras
Would it be reasonable to put a WiFi camera in a faraday cage with a micro WiFi transmitter attached to Ethernet? I was thinking about that because my WiFi gets bogged down with too many cameras and thought it might be nice to still use cheap WiFi cameras but make them effectively wired.
Looks like SimpliSafe became aware of this problem as far back as at least 2019 and made a blog post about it.<p><a href="https://simplisafe.com/blog/jam-detection-update" rel="nofollow">https://simplisafe.com/blog/jam-detection-update</a>
Maybe install a camera on your mailbox out by the street that takes a snapshot of every car that goes by so you can see if someone is watching the house or cruising by regularly. Might give early warning and also capture license plates and maybe faces.
I have a couple of security cameras around the house. Started with wifi cameras but switched to wired ethernet for the newer one because of unstable wifi and high latency...
Looks like there's now one more reason that was the right choice.
I'm more worried about proprietary camera/DVR software allowing (easy) access to my video feeds wirelessly.<p>Not 100% fool proof, but my solution is wired cameras, and all on a UPS.<p>Plus a pack of giant dogs..
it's pretty easy to do this. you can can just send deauth packets using a card that supports it. I tried it out on my ring cameras, which resulted in the camera being knocked offline temporarily.
It mentions flooding wifi with traffic so real traffic can't get through. Do they have access to the network, or are they just blasting the target spectrum?
I mean my $25 Wyze cameras keep recording to the SD card even when offline. Is it going to help during, but I can watch them of my house after I guess.
dont rely on cameras.<p>one of my favorite moves, is to deposit, carbon or marking chalk, on the sill where tha sash covers it. window entry means you get it all over everything, and maybe leave prints.