How criminals are using jammers, deauthers to disrupt WiFi security cameras
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If you're a connoisseur of corp-speak, this is the 100% pure undiluted stuff. You must need a degree in Communications and 10 years experience to talk like that.
Nest has one now[0].
EDIT: my bad, it doesn't have a hardwired network, it just has more local memory for recordings.
0. https://www.engadget.com/googles-2nd-gen-wired-nest-doorbell...
Though that's the only mention.
Edit: ah, it's still Wifi, just has more memory.
From: https://blog.google/products/google-nest/nest-doorbell-wired...
"And if your Wi-Fi is spotty one day, you still won’t miss any important moments. The new Nest Doorbell will automatically record an hour’s worth of important events to its local memory."
As my dad pointed out when I was trying to show off my shiny new video doorbell.
"What's to stop them just ripping it off the wall and taking it with them?"
I hope to be half skilled at tempering my children's enthusiasm as he is.
I have Home Assistant set up to flash my desk lamp and play a little tune on an ESP32 speaker under my desk when someone rings it; the video part is just an added bonus.
I haven't been to MickD's in a really long time, but do they have free/open wifi with no captive portals? Seems like a big liability risk for a corp their size (or any fast food chain) to have it wide open.
I know some Arby's are semi open wifi. They do have a web client after connecting that I think authenticates you somehow. But I have no idea what it's actually doing.
That would be a way larger security risk.
That's the problem though - they already sold you something. They have your money. That's where the interest and care usually ends for most companies, because any potential future money to be extracted from you is just that - potential. If their issues prevented you from giving you money in the first place, then that's a completely different question, but that's kinda hard to prove.
https://ring.com/products/video-doorbell-elite
https://ring.com/products/stick-up-security-camera-elite-poe
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/628267/Where+is+the+WiFi...
I don't see what prevents a determined user from removing the built-in antenna, and run a coaxial cable with suitable characteristic impedance from the WiFi doorbell's u.FL connector to a cheap WiFi dongle somewhere inside (perhaps add an attenuator if the lowest transmit powers are too high).
? "More accurately"?
The poster pointed said Ring didn't have an ethernet/PoE option.
I linked their ethernet/PoE cameras and doorbell. Your desire to frankenstein a 2.4GHz wired connection for the lower end products isn't related.
From the perspective of the radios in the doorbell or a wifi dongle it doesn't matter if you are transceiving via antenna over the ether or transceiving over coax, as long as you use a suitable characteristic impedance.
For a person who doesn't understand cars perhaps changing a tire feels like "Frankensteining" too...
I suggest you reconsider the downvote but predict the suggestion to be in vain.
The quote of your parent was:
> neither Ring nor Nest has a hardwired network option (or, better yet, PoE)
so it's not entirely honest when you say:
> The poster pointed said Ring didn't have an ethernet/PoE option.
(eliding that this person made a more general statement: not having a hardwired connection)
So I think my point stands that it does have a hardwired connector (transmission line to u.FL) and that it isn't broken out.
Those who wish their security camera to function in a mission critical setting (like working when it's supposed to work, even in the face of wireless jamming) I make a practical suggestion (as opposed to lamenting the idiocy of the average uninformed consumer when selecting a WiFi doorbell, like I read in other comments on this HN submission).
All it requires is to disassemble the doorbell a little, to remove the WiFi antenna, to drill a small hole in the plastic casing, and to attach a coaxial cable.
Do you remember old ethernet? it ran over coax too.
If most posters on this HN submission lament the idiocy of the consumer when selecting a WiFi security doorbell, those consumers can only conclude to buy another model, with the older one ending up in a landfill or at least unused. It is more ecological to fix the design, and thankfully WiFi antenna is a separate PCB so theres a u.FL connector for a coax to connect to, internally. This way these doorbells can continue to be used.
In trying to understand why a person would consider running a WiFi network over a coaxial cable a Frankenstein-like idea, I can only conclude it stems from a form of xenophobia: it is easy to believe that everything is the way it is because its the best way to handle things. In fact as a transmission line coaxial cables are superior to "ethernet" cables, its just that the latter are much cheaper to manufacture. This resulted in the (economical) dominance of "ethernet" cables. It is then only one misconception away to erroneously believe non-coaxial cables were chosen for their superior performance, when in fact its just a cost trade-off. So I conclude you are not too familiar with physics or electronics, else you would not call this Frankensteining.
People whom you reply to can't downvote you. Others did. My response criticizing your "more accurately" is sitting at +6.
> > > neither Ring nor Nest has a hardwired network option (or, better yet, PoE)
> > https://ring.com/products/video-doorbell-elite [example of PoE network option from Ring]
> More accurately, ...
Don't know if you didn't reply to whom you intended, or whatever, but I assure you, my response was quite "accurate".
> All it requires is to disassemble the doorbell a little, to remove the WiFi antenna, to drill a small hole in the plastic casing, and to attach a coaxial cable.
I can disassemble things with plastic latches. I can solder wires to boards. I can add ICs to pads and add tiny rework wires and CA them all down pretty. This doesn't mean they're "included".
That is correct, my suggestion requires one to buy a coaxial cable of suitable characteristic impedance at the required frequency, and some u.FL connector(s), they are obviously not included in the doorbell.
Drilling a hole in a plastic casing, and installing a connector on bare coaxial wire is pretty simple, one just looks up the steps and performs them. I consider it much easier than PCB board rework (which isn't necessary in my suggestion: just disconnect the u.FL-connected PCB antenna, and attach the coaxial cable).
I finally see what you mean: my comment was indeed supposed to reply to the parent T3OU-736 commenter. I switched devices, and your comment made the relevant quote more prominent as opposed to some part in the middle of a sentence...
My apologies!
The point of a Ring doorbell is to get something that just works-- not to string lots of high frequency coax, dedicate a wifi radio on the other side, figure out appropriate attenuation (probably want about 65dB total between coax and pad from 20dBm to -45dBm), and troubleshoot inevitable resulting fuckery.
If you'd come at things from another angle--- replying to the post above, and say-- well, you actually could just patch right into the wifi radio and run coax!-- your comment might have been favorably received.
Quite possibly most WiFi radios can reach low transmit and high receive levels, as some devices are placed in proximity and some at large distance.
A top brand 20 dB attenuator can be had for less than $4...
It's also not too close to 50 ohms up that high above design frequency and the connectors make huge reflections.
> Quite possibly most WiFi radios can reach low transmit and high receive levels, as some devices are placed in proximity and some at large distance.
Path loss of even adjacent antennas is pretty high.
Again, though, this is all a huge diversion: all I did was point out that Ring does actually offer PoE doorbells, and you came in and "corrected" me.
BTW does the PoE doorbell you linked actually have an ethernet network, or does it just use it for power?
I fully concede my original comment should have replied your parent, but the following replies were responses to the contents of your comments (Frankenstein, etc.)
Yes, it uses it for data and power (power is optional: you may power it separately)
"We're not responsible for the service in the event of a disruption of the radio field technologies used by our products"
A security camera using wifi should still record even if it looses wifi connection for a few minutes.
WiFi even in perfect conditions is much less reliable than a wired connection, so a security device that is dependent on wifi should have a buffer, even if a wired device would not.
I can take measures to secure wired connection (metal / armored conduit as an example) there are very very limit to no measures you can take to prevent signal jamming
I'm sure we all know that most residential locks can be picked with relative ease, but criminals rarely go through the trouble. The one time a person did "break in" to my house, they just opened an unlocked door. Usually I keep that door locked, a large piece of plywood in front of it, and a table saw braced up against that. Just so happened I worked on a project that day and just forgot to lock the door. Lucky break for her, but trying enough doorknobs she was bound for find some. She had gotten into two other houses that night. She was also tripped out on meth and couldn't have operated a WiFi jammer if she wanted to.
So, yea, a WiFi camera isn't great, but it's still going to get 99% of criminals out there. Next we just need WiFi jammer alarms.
"... but I think that's outside the relm of what most consumers can do."
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
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.
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.
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.
Usually it's meth heads trying to steal something that is easy to grab not the CIA.
I imagine them downloading movies and images that get me into trouble with the wife / LEAs / both.
I'm Dick with the FBI. Is your husband home?
I will get in trouble with my wife because the feds will rat me out to her for something stupid these hypothetical kids end up doing.
Chrome lets me add an exception for the box itself, but really how many end user do you know that will not click on "take me to the http version(unsafe)", when talking about their home router?
So given the fact that I am in your wifi, One could use dhcp (if active) for MITM attacks, grab the router password and install tracking daemons right on top.
Next step would be to forward the dns requests to one of mine so I can build a map of what sites you use and from there all I have to to is to make you accept an insecure ssl cert and done?
Axis P1204 has a small camera sensor separated from the camera body by a 25' cable, which makes it easier to enclose and secure the camera body. Not seen that elsewhere, must be a proprietary protocol on that cable, e.g. RPi camera sensor cables can only be a few cm.
It is build like a tank and fully aluminium. If you mount it right you easily can hold a person from it. I bascially made a hole through the wall for the cables and mounted it directly to the outside wall.
For now im quite confident that nobody will be able to remove it without much fuzz
A bit off topic, but can we please stop calling people "consumers"? It's such a weird and patronising term, not to mention completely unnecessary when "people" does a better job.
"Consumer" IS the technically more accurate term, as outside of the consumption of tech/services as designed for them, they do not venture beyond that realm & try to understand how the tech works.
Similar analogies include:
- Not caring about how a car works internally, & leaving its repair & maintenance to a mechanic.
- Not caring about how their dishes were made, & leaving that to cooks/chefs.
- Not caring about the minutiae of the law, & leaving that to the legal system & its lawyers & judges.
- Not caring about sewer maintenance, & leaving that for sewage workers.
- Not caring about recyclables processing, & leaving that for recycling plants.
- Not caring about Y, and leaving that for (workers/entities that work with Y).
All of us are consumers in some form or another: We require the services of others that require the services of others that require the services of others ad infinitum.
In my language, employers are routinely called "work-givers", employees are "work-takers", even though we have a perfectly fine "employee" term. I hate how it introduces a power relationship into the terms themselves.
But I also know it's a lost fight. I once specifically used the neutral term for employee in a work contract I wrote - which was best practice just a few decades ago. It was immediately changed.
You left out the dramatic details. So you stopped and confronted her directly yourself, or called the police who caught her(later)?
(In general, it is not advisable to confront meth addicts, they might be armed and not restrained in any way.)
So I got a wired network now, on a separate LAN and have two cameras on each perimeter, so if someone tries to cut the cable (unfortunately I was unable to run the cables inside the wall, so they run in PVC pipes attached to the wall), I very least should have that recorded. Also all my cameras are 4k. The cameras also record to built in SD card. There are also two servers hidden each is pulling the videos from DVR to back up and then one copy is uploaded to external server.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/vlan/switch_conf...
All we need is onboard storage to record a couple hours of video locally which can then be synced when the connection is back again. Right? That doesn't fix real-time information transmission, but video is most often important for finding suspects after the fact.
And they usually wear masks, so the video you do record are useless anyway.
Sounds like you think law enforcement actually give a shit about/can do anything toward solving burglary crime.
Maybe it's better in other countries, but 5% solve rate sounds like they go and knock on the doors of the local known burglars to see if they still got the goods lying around.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/17/figures-less...
However, also in many countries, like my own, police is very under staffed and burglaries are often on the bottom of the priorities list. Armed robberies, murders, shootings, stabbings, explosions, fires, domestic abuse, rape, to name a few, are the ones that get the highest priority. And those things take a lot of work to find suspects, prove what they're suspected of, write it down and get them convicted.
A case, unfortunately, isn't finished when you catch a suspect. It's a crap load of work to get someone convicted and that gets massively underestimated by people who only read statistics and conclude that LE doesn't care... Most of us do, which is why we join the field.
> Next we just need WiFi jammer alarms.
i think youve taken a wrong turn somewhere...
An off-the-shelf consumer PVR that uses wired ethernet typically has its own integrated PoE switch on its own subnet. Maybe it will route to your LAN if you probe the private ranges, but it's also a fairly straightforward software issue to fix - nothing fundamental to the arrangement, and at no additional marginal cost.
However MOST people don't understand the technology. As the resident IT person in my family/friends, I've been asked about this sort of thing on a regular basis. Everytime I talk them through the convenience vs security. Without fail people are surprised by the idea of being easy to "jam" wifi.
Even some of the tech savvy don't realize how cheap it is to build a deauther. I can get ESP8266 units for less than $2 each and load up pre-made deauth firmware from Github in a matter of minutes.
Deauth is a little more finesse, but barely.
It amazes me that most people overlook the ease at which their frontline defense can be thwarted.
Don't they at least remember all the times it cuts out on them?
More than that, people are being intentionally mislead by Amazon who is well aware of the massive vulnerabilities their products have, but still advertise their devices as being secure and able to protect the customer. They even have police going door to door shilling for them.
It's perfectly reasonable for people to believe tech companies and Officer Friendly when they both say a ring camera is a smart purchase and they should buy one. They should feel betrayed when they find out they bought a device that's trivial to bypass and the best Amazon has to offer by way of a solution is that they waste their time calling customer support who can do nothing for them.
Also, this whole interference issues is like a big DUH!!! There's a label on the devices (or at least the docs provided) with the FCC logo that states that the device much accept that interference or however the labels are worded. I don't have anything within arms reach with one of those labels.
Looks like a year, but prison is prison.
That said, I'm not convinced the criminals in this case jammed anything; she said hours were missing and car thieves aren't sticking around that long, and balaclavas are still cheap. And the techie "of course you need to hardwire everything" is extraordinarily unhelpful.
Actually being useful would be spreading knowledge that deauth attacks can be prevented with 802.11w (even other posters here don't seem to know that!), and pointing out what supports that and how to enable it. Or promoting cameras with enough local storage to mitigate being disconnected for a half hour or so, which is also useful for power outages...
802.11w is part of WPA3 in WiFi-6, which can still be attacked, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33089451
Deauth attacks are a distraction.
Worrying about criminals jamming wifi is the distraction, because criminals definitely carry around microwaves and portable kilowatt power sources, or implement novel DoS attacks, all just to temporarily disconnect cameras that if it's competent, cached all the video locally anyway.
Why not worry about criminals cutting mains power? That'd kill most wired cameras even harder than battery-powered wireless ones.
I think it’s a great mental exercise akin to escape rooms or Tetris.
Today in most areas (at least in the US) Normally that means just getting away without interacting with the cops at the moment sometimes not even that is required
the defund police movement, bail reform, and many other political movements have more or less decriminalized property crime
Unless you have a gun, are violent (sometimes not even then), or steal from a politically connected person chances are the police in the US will do nothing for normal everyday theft from a normal everyday person
It is my experience that local law enforcement put very little effort into solving property crime. The effort rises dramatically if the victim is a cop (or is related to one), a politician gets involved or the media reports on the crime.
As one example, after my father died, people were using his credit cards and checkbook to steal money (until the Master Death File sent his details to banks). The police said that this crime was so common that they did not investigate (nor refer anything to the district attorney) when the theft is below $250k. A casual mention that dad was a volunteer cop, and had been for 9 years lit a fire under the police and they had investigated and arrested the perps within 2 weeks.
One of the perps worked at his doctor's office and had access to his records (including payment details). She had plead to a lesser charge and when her parole officer visited her office and checked the office computer records, it turns out that he wasn't the only victim of this sort of thing (emptying dead people's bank accounts). Additionally, she was using the doctor's office computer to issue narcotics prescriptions that she also sold.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221421262...
> The key takeaway of our analysis is that currently there exist diverse ways of abusing SAE to inflict DoS, and, excluding software bugs, some of them are rather due to misconceptions or conjectures done while implementing the standard.
According to the St Louis Fed 65% of US households are home-owners[1]. Now if there is some other data about "or otherwise have restrictions" to show how it becomes a majority of US, I would be interested in seeing that.
1 https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2020/09/23/record-number...
Powerline tends to be sorta unreliable and only runs at like 5-15% of the rated max speed, but if you had buffering at the camera to ensure all frames made it to the otherside, you could work around that.
They are controversial with other radio users, because while the devices themselves don't emit much RF energy, your home wiring and wiring in the street will typically radiate most of the high frequency data into the air, disrupting FM radio and lots of other sub 500 Mhz radio users.
> I was trying to get a good signal upstairs, downstairs, and outside at the same time. I didn't want to run an Ethernet cable out a window or drill a hole in a wall or floor, so I was stuck with moving around a Wi-Fi access point. That was until I realized that I already had wire in the walls—coax cable! But wait, you can't use coax cable for Ethernet communication, can you? The answer turned out to be yes, you can!
I’ve done similar things indoors, however there should be no gaps with properly hung and weatherstripped exterior doors, at least there aren’t in any of the places I’ve lived, purely for energy reasons.
This seems hyperbolic to me. You don’t need internet connected cameras and doorbells for your home to have a semblance of security. That’s what locks are for, and maybe a big fence behind the house.
Most people won’t ever have their home broken in to - according to a quick Google there were ~192,000 burglaries reported in 2021 in England & Wales. Extrapolate that over a typical lifetime and you’ll see 15.3 million nationwide, which for a population of about 65 million people means 76% of people never have anyone break in.
Wireless cameras and doorbells are, on the whole, products which rather than giving peace of mind leave people constantly worried that someone is going to do something, after all, we can see the constant stream of suspicious looking people setting of the motion detection.
All the camera allows you to do is point at some vaguely humanoid figures in your house to the police (who will likely not be able to do anything about it) and to your insurance (who likely would have paid out anyway)
What I'd like to know is if turning your house into a fortress makes you _more_ of a target to a specific subset of professional high-end thieves, as they know you have valuable stuff that you would like to protect.
The landlord can open those locks with their keys.
1. You’re correct, they don’t need to be Internet connected, they do need to be network connected. That’s how the video gets from the camera to the recording device.
2. Locks just keep an honest man honest, and are another thing you can’t change in a rental (at least in the US).
There are a lot of other precautions someone can take if they can modify the building, but pretty limited options for renters.
All that said, I take a very… American… view on this. I need /evidence/ after the fact, which is what the camera is for. I work from home and am pretty much always here, so the most likely scenario is I kill my home invader, and need that evidence for my defense. In the US, self-defense is an affirmative defense, meaning because I live in a heavily blue area, I’m guaranteed to be arrested and charged, and the camera provides evidence that the person entered uninvited.
My primary precaution against burglary and home invasion is having a tech salary that lets me afford living in an area where there are few burglaries and home invasions. The cameras are necessary for evidence after the fact, and to help with retrieving package deliveries promptly.
Indeed a quick search shows that newer Google Nest cameras support recording for an hour during Wi-Fi outage: https://store.google.com/magazine/compare_cameras?hl=en-US I'm surprised that Ring doesn't have something equivalent.
Well - most effective is to just steal from an area where police are known to do nothing about property theft. So, most of the US then…
If I'm already security aware enough to do that, I'm probably cutting power, phones and will have some idea (IR cameras are easy to find) what needs taking care of in terms of internal security.
Concealed network storage and backup power is how I go to jail.
The door magnetic sensor is easily bypassed with a strong neodyne magnet, but you most likely need an accomplice as you most close the door while still holding the magnet over the sensor from the outside - might be possible to do it alone if you have two magnets. Found a YouTube video of that in action https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pPsSraQ3wlo
Next thing I want to try is to blind the motion sensors with strong IR light, but have not found time for that yet.
What I am really paying for is the stickers staying I have an alarm
Also might consider a portable electromagnet like used to erase VHS tapes. I’ve got one on the shelf still considering what to exploit with it. I was going to try the car sensors at certain traffic signals but an engineer friend in transportation reminded me interfering with normal equipment operation is a felony if caught…which is why he wouldn’t share his Opticom clone software with me.
One mitigation is to secure the physical camera, e.g. Axis P1204 can separate the camera lens by 25 feet from the camera with SD card, which can be located inside a locked enclosure/safe/room.
The cameras run on a separate wireless network and save to an SD card in the base station. You can also do RTSP streams.
Aside from immunity to radio signal jamming, there's no worrying about batteries/charging or ugly wall warts. You can also power your PoE switch from a UPS to survive power outages.
It's also vendor agnostic and fairly future proof. What I mean is while you might have lock-in with cameras/NVR today, you aren't locked in forever; worst case is you may be forced to replace everything but the wiring, but that's by far the hardest part to do in a finished house. The Cat5/6/7 will be useful for the foreseeable future.
More flexible in some ways, I’m using 1 port of my 8-way injector to add PoE to the WAN interface of my router. In conjunction with an active PoE “splitter” on the far end I can remotely power the GPON modem on the other side of the house and power everything from one UPS.
I also made sure to get a Mode A “gigabit” injector in order to power 2x PoE cameras in a location with a single Cat6 drop. On the far end there’s just a passive splitter, each camera only gets 2 pairs which run both 100Mbit Ethernet and PoE. Cheaper “non-gigabit” PoE Mode B injectors save a buck by omitting the isolation transformers and instead inject DC onto the spare pairs, so not compatible with pair scavenging.
MikroTik’s PoE switches also use Mode B. They’re gigabit so have to include the isolation transformers anyway, presumably this is due to their ability to operate in 24V passive PoE mode. I was going to get a MikroTik switch but my pair scavenging requirements drove me down the path of a separate multi-port injector, which worked out to be a lot cheaper too!
8 port injector with a decently powerful 56V power supply was approx $100 via AliExpress.
Only drawback is a bit more cabling and no ability to remote power cycle an individual port.
> Microwave ovens are not tuned to any specific resonance frequency for water molecules in the food, but rather produce a broad spectrum of frequencies, cooking food via dielectric heating of polar molecules, including water. Several absorption peaks for water lie within the microwave range, and while it is true that these peaks are caused by quantization of molecular energy levels corresponding to a single frequency, water absorbs radiation across the entire microwave spectrum.
I just installed an Amcrest doorbell which took me like 10 minutes. I'm using it with Scrypted to connect it to HomeKit. I didn't install it for security reasons. My old doorbell switch was broken and I figured as long as I needed to replace it, it would be nice to see what the heck my dog is constantly barking about.
If I wanted something for security reasons, I'd indeed use a PoE camera, but it wouldn't be a doorbell cam. There's very few PoE doorbell cameras in any case and they are quite a bit more expensive. And pulling an ethernet cable to the doorbell switch location would be non-trivial.
This technology could just come built into these cameras which would be the responsible thing to do.
https://www.doorbird.com/downloads/datasheet_a1071_it.pd
It’s expensive, not weatherproof, and hard to order. Same for the one made by 2N. These both recycle old DSL technology I believe.
How difficult it is to install also depends on how your doorbell circuit is wired. Mine goes from a transformer in my basement to a switch on my door and from there to two chimes with a junction hidden somewhere. For these converters to work you need a straight run end to end.
The tedium/difficulty/expense of running cabling through walls and crawl spaces is something a lot of tech people seem to take for granted. Wireless is convenient(ish), particularly compared to the aforementioned, so most people are naturally going to gravitate towards it if that serves purpose.
Also, ethernet cabling available right at the front door is a security concern in itself. You need to be knowledgable of networking and have appropriate networking hardware to properly secure it against physical attacks.
I have seen some cases of just using spray paint or even some kind of oil or whatever else to mess up the lens (mainly for doorbells or otherwise where the camera is easy to reach and see) or if it's too far out of reach they just throw rocks or hit it with a long stick or similar until it's out of action.
I'm not really sure what these things are for. Nobody seems to be able to identify anyone from these (low resolution, not a great frame rate or bit depth, the person is often masked), yet people post "Do you know who this is who was trying the handle on my car door at 3 a.m.?" I would think people would do better with concealed, street-adjacent pairs of cameras pointed antiparallel to capture license plates and just use this Ring business as a way to know when to check the cameras. As it stands, they seem to be "Yes, a porch pirate did in fact take your stuff" confirmations and little else.
Another possibility is that the employee might be running a jammer to reduce the effectiveness of any company tracking.
There are car RF amplifiers that can run into the hundreds of watts or more and they do cause significant interference across many frequencies. CB radio users using these amps can easily be heard on home stereo systems, and sometimes even toasters (as lore goes, from their common use in the 70s & 80s).
They also don't mark us as the type of people that have anything worth the effort and risk of stealing.
What I mean by "distance from the road" is the number of layers between driver action and machine reaction. Changing gears in a manual is a direct, instantaneous (pending a crunch and grind) process from driver action to machine reaction. Pressing the accelerator in an automatic has always had a noticeable lag, for me at least, being raised in a manual. In this much more modern car, there's not just the auto-lag, there also seems to be a choice the car itself makes in what it feels like it's an attempt to be maximally efficient on fuel, in restricting acceleration. It really feels there's more a layer of software in addition to the acceleration auto-lag.
The end result feels like an unpredictable rate of acceleration as I increasingly convince the car to "fucking move you piece of shit" whilst attempting to enter traffic at a decent clip. The car ends up massively over-revving in a low gear/band and then almost skipping the next two gears to settle into the normal 60 - 80 kmph zone.
This "distance from the road" is bothersome to me, but may be (much?) safer for the majority of drivers who aren't used to being so "near the road".
Vale the manual car!
(If you can't drive a manual, you lack the concentration and skill required to safely drive any car on a public road. It was an appropriate and effective barrier to entry whose absence is a threat to every road user)
In a manual on the other hand, if you start having a lead foot, the engine lets you know. Once you are familiar with a given manual car's gear ratios, you don't need the dashboard anymore. You know what 3000 rpm feels like because (in a good drivers car at least) you can feel the engine vibrating through the pedals, through the steering wheel, and through the gear shift, in additon to hearing the exhaust note. You also quickly figure out what speed a given rpm gets you in each gear. Maybe 4th gear at about 2000rpm is your 35mph cruising gear. To go over the speed limit in this case you would have to rev the engine up which would be noticeable, or shift into 5th.
Have we yet developed consumer grade counter-jamming tech? Seems like the tech to detect and recognize these attacks shouldn't be very expensive at all, and then it can text you (mobile network, of course) to call the police on the jammers (I imagine the police would get pretty peeved if you don't have a human in the loop.)
From there we can get some sort of adaptive, agile jammers for the criminals, and then FPGAs recording the jammers for processing and recognition at a central anti-jamming-as-a-service company.
Advanced missile warfare for my neighborhood, without the explosives!
Those with the ability to jam/deauth WPA3 could potentially use an IMSI catcher to block SMS.
"A Florida man was discovered deceased under his vehicle last week with bizarre injuries. Examination of video from a neighbour's security camera shows he was working under his vehicle at the time when suddenly the vehicle crushed him into the driveway. "
Not really practical.
Run a hard wire to it. It's simple, and it works.
Of course, portability might be a problem.
With a firmware that supports TX99 (a mode where radio is transmitting all the time, typically used for testing/certification process)- easily.
Car manufactures added a motion sensor to the fobs to disable the signal after being motionless, and that's all that was really needed to kill the attack.
Brute jamming of course will affect any encryption you use.
I have no idea if this is actually true or not.
...they are breaking into peoples houses and robbing them.
+ Make the target unappealing (well kept, well lit, reasonably hardened)
+ Alert on attacks (cameras, alarms, dogs)
+ Slow down attackers (hardened doors, window coverings, good locks)
+ Response force
Like fenced home, clearly visual cameras around the place, night sensor lights, dog, security monitoring company?
Perhaps there could be a security monitoring company that used AI human recognition, then users would set their general times. Hence, anyone approaching at night would be pinged by the AI, and a human would verify whether its a security threat or not.
AI being used would be necessary to make 24/7 monitoring across tons of homes possible.
You don't want to look like fort knox. You do want to look just a bit more hardened than your neighbors.
If window bars and serious fences are the norm, do that. If nobody has window bars, don't do that.
AI human recognition misses a lot. AI also can't tell the difference between a girl scout selling cookies and a criminal scouting a place (or a bored uber driver waiting for a slow client).
> By utilizing both real-life modern Wi-Fi 6 certified and non-certified equipment and the OpenBSD’s hostapd, we expose a significant number of novel DoS assaults affecting virtually any AP. No less important, more than a dozen of vendor-depended and severe zero-day DoS assaults are manifested, showing that the implementation of the protocol by vendors is not yet mature enough. The fallout of the introduced attacks to the associated stations ranges from a temporary loss of Internet connectivity to outright disconnection. To our knowledge, this work provides the first wholemeal appraisal of SAE’s mechanism endurance against DoS, and it is therefore anticipated to serve as a basis for further research in this timely and intriguing area.
I want to be able to move cameras inside my business on a whim. The cameras are 99% for monitoring while we're open. They solve many, many mysteries that tend to take place in bars.
If it is jammed or attacked.. that should generate an alert.
Even a hardwired camera can be painted or hit with a bb gun.
Told him to replace the doorbell video camera with Ethernet wire-based (IEEE 802.3) ones is the only condition of getting back into their grace. They’re unable (or unwilling) to.
Hence begins my long road of repurposing the ADT panel and its hardware sensors with Home Assistant.
And said corporation also shares Ring video with the police so the cops can monitor you 24/7 too.
So yeah, Ring is a security device. It's just not for your security.
For example, one simple one was taking an axe to the phone terminal box mounted on an exterior wall. Goodbye alarms that used the phone system. I had a big fight with The Phone Company because I wanted the phone box inside. They finally made me sign a paper saying they were not responsible for it, because they didn't have access to it.
The burglar who really wants to get into your house enough to carry an axe... I mean, really?
Have you made sure they can't disable the siren with a foam fire extinguisher? [1] :-)
They managed to only grab a small number of items before the police arrived much sooner than expected. Of course the portly constabulary were unable to chase them through the woods behind our building and they were apprehended weeks later because they were unable to maintain operational security and were talking to their friends too much.
With how much people post on the internet these days, you can case a place rather easily these days.
Traditionally the way this was solved for businesses was with a cellular or (before that) radio back up. My dad's photoshop/darkroom business in Miami in the 70s/80s had a radio connected alarm, but ultimately, a physical barrier (solid barred backdoor, a gate across the windows in front) was the best preventative. The pawn shop in the same strip mall wasn't so lucky: thieves used a sledge hammer to make a hole in the cinder block wall from behind while somehow avoiding setting off the shop's alarm.
I'm still trying to imagine a burglar carrying an axe to break into a house. I saw some crazy shit growing up in Miami and even I can't imagine that.
Remebert to put them on a VLAN because they can still get rippred right of the wall they are mounted on and an attacker would have easy acces to all other systems.
adequately label the lines and patch panel.
save some money for a good network core (like managed switches, a wlan controller, etc) and a wall-mount rack. there are subreddits made for this if you want to see how it's done.
Be warned though that structured wiring tends to end up being appreciably more expensive than a 19" rack and commercial devices, because it's a very small market. e.g. in theory you can put your ethernet switch neatly in a structured wiring enclosure but in practice there are very few options for gigabit switches that fit the structured wiring module system and they tend to cost considerably more than a comparable switch. This means that you end up zip-tying a desktop switch into the enclosure along with its power brick, it becomes a hassle. You can put a wall-mount rack in a hall closet ventilated with AC Infinity products or something like that.
I don't think there's a lot more you can do to futureproof than to have cat 6 run everywhere and a PoE+ switch, and the good news is that none of this is really that expensive. A surprising number of tract homes and apartment complexes are being done with structured wiring systems these days, I just think they're sort of underdelivering on installed cable because of the high cost of structured wiring enclosures and the perceived need to run coaxial cable (equipped for satellite antenna!) and 2-pair telephone as well, with the high cost of structured wiring patch panels and distribution amplifiers for those. I really wish people would adopt more of an "ethernet to every wall" approach as you see in commercial construction. And 19" racks; the increasing use of vertical wall cabinet racks means that there's a pretty good selection now of network devices with power consumption and fanless or very quiet cooling similar to consumer devices.
eBay sometimes has older Axis (enterprise) PoE cameras, but those no longer get firmware updates.
Axis P1204 has a camera sensor that can be separated from the camera by 25 feet, https://www.networkcamerastore.com/axis-p1204-0531-001-minia.... Would be nice to accomplish the same with a Linux SBC (RPi, ODROID, Rock64), where MIPI camera cables are usually limited to cm, not meters.
This ESP32 board has Ethernet and battery charger, https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-EVB/open-sou...
Axis sells to enterprise customers, so their PoE cameras have known properties.
Continuous recording and decent resolution = $15/month. Pricey, but it is what it is.
It's definitely a rabbit's hole digging into these stuff. Expect to dedicate long hours of research and setup, due to the multiple options there are, brands/models/cameras/technologies.
Making your own camera, as suggested by other person, at this point is pointless.
Any of those with non-Chinese firmware, or rootable for replacement with open-source firmware?
> Making your own camera, as suggested by other person, at this point is pointless
Unless you want control of the software on the camera, sometimes of interest to hackers who read news.
Open firmware for some camera SoCs (HiSilicon, Goke, Ingenic): https://openipc.org/
The idea that you can't effectively isolate them network wise is just a stretch.
> Switches were not designed as security devices. Their use as such simply evolved over time, and is ancillary to their main use as devices that improve network performance. If you use a switch for security reasons, you are relying on the correct configuration of the switch, including understanding not only the standards that the switch software is based upon, but also the correct implementation of those standards. The 802.1Q spec itself is 211 pages long, and is only one of a handful of standards that a compliant switch manufacturer must support. Any time that you need to segregate networks for serious security purposes, I recommend that you not use a switch.
"Framework for Layer 2 attacks" (2005), https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-05/BH_EU_05...
To this day, I still won't connect it to my network, and don't really consider that class of cameras an option -- and from what I hear, mine is not a unique experience.
There are obviously alternatives on the market, but they're rarely cheap.
Ie, a layer 1 attack.