WiFi jammers against security cameras is such a 'duh' once you hear it. Wifi security cameras are so easy to beat with this. And unless you alarm on any downtime it leaves you fully vulnerable.
Wi-Fi conveniently enables x-ray vision (IEEE 802.11bf) through walls of home, making it easier for attackers to identify where valuables are stored, observe password keystrokes, etc. Any room with a safe should have EMF shielding.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/us/burglary-tourists-visa-wai...
> Prosecutors say the break-in is part of a larger issue in which so-called “burglary tourists” enter the United States .. they join sophisticated burglary rings that prey on luxury homes.. “They take advantage of the fact that most people don’t have window sensors or motion detectors on their second floors. They have WiFi jammers to stop the alarm company from being notified.. the stolen goods are often sold quickly and the money is sent back to the suspect’s home country. Most often, that’s Chile.
Is always smart - use unique bright yellow (say) CAT cable to route from cameras to local storage .. and on the last leg route the real camera data to a hidden NVR behind a good false panel and "continue on" with fake yellow CAT to a decoy NVR in plain view.
It's a good feeling when robbers have visually followed the bright cables to the decoy storage and trashed the drives that don't have the idiots faces and other data stored in HiRes.
security by bamboozlement
That's why matching cable from cameras [ ... disappears, reappears ... ] and into visible on office desk sacrifical anode NAS box works. They don't trace the cabling, they make assumptions based on matching colour. The 'trick' is to make sure the camera display screens cut out if the "fake" NAS goes down .. best to route to screen through sacrifical secondary storage.
> That is a scenario that only happens in the movies.
Here, in my part of the world, it's used by several contracters I'm aware of, in homes, shops, warehouses .. fake drives near camera display screens get destroyed in break ins more often than you realise - and more frequently in recent years.
Even in the US the Afroman raids show the police about to rip drives out of the security system .. if there'd been a decoy box | real time cloud backup there'd be more footage of the raid for his songs and court case.
If you feel that you have a legitimate threat that might lead to attackers trying to disable your video system you would more commonly install better equipment. Cameras that are more covert, or are ruggedized/vandal proof, and installed out of reach. Installations that leave no exposed cables, PC-based video recorders that don't have branding or indications of what they are doing, etc.
I think bigger problem is people that think they can do that in first place still being employed in police...
Shouldn't the NVR have real time offsite backups and/or a redundant NVR instead of a decoy?
First, decoy recorders are extremely rare, and never really recommended. Most higher-end systems are using software on a PC for the video recording, not a little NVR appliance anyway. In that case your recorder can be any random PC, potentially even hidden in plain sight.
Real time offsite backups is usually not practical for reasons of upstream bandwidth limitations. A common camera can easily produce a bitstream of 2+Mbps. Get a dozen of those going, and you're bumping up against the upstream bandwidth limit of cable internet providers in the US. If you have the bandwidth for realtime offsite backups, then you can skip the on-site NVR/recorder and go with a full cloud solution like Eagle Eye (this will have a small onsite PC that acts as a buffer so that if you have a short outage of a few hours, or congestion, you don't lose video).
Either way, in the city I live in most residences have 1gb up/down fiber connections. a real time offsite back up is trivial for anyone who wants to do that here.
Internet connections have certainly become more robust in recent years, and cloud video storage is becoming more common, but I don't think it even makes up 1% of the market at this point. Offsite backups, remote storage, etc. are still the exception, not the rule.
Overall, the video surveillance market has many price sensitive customers. Redundancy means increased costs, it is not an easy sell, particularly when attacks on the video surveillance system/components are exceptionally rare in most cases.
During this, it will become apparent that this was an inside job, and the attackers had knowledge of the system, and thus most common hardening or mitigation procedures would be less effective against an informed attacker. Because of that, the feeling of a need to install the most robust systems with offsite backups will drop to near zero.
The article doesn't even state that the video system was in fact disabled, or that they were using wifi cameras at all. Obviously, the police are not disclosing many details, it is possible that they have video from the robbery and are simply not saying it.
Most large sites put their cameras on segregated networks, so it might not even be obvious to folks for a while.
Or an NVR deployment could use 802.1BR to isolate all the cameras.
I’m a firm believer in endpoint security — endpoints should not need to trust the network for authentication or authorization when communicating with each other. But the network really ought to be able to do its job despite attacks by rogue endpoints or someone compromising a single piece of network infrastructure, and the network’s job is to maintain reliable connectivity.
I've spent a lot of time handling support for big camera deploys and I was surprised by the number of customers who would bring their systems down by misconfiguring their own networks.
It's called Ethernet for a reason. You fling packets into the ether and hope they come out the other end. What happens in the ether is anyone's guess.
https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-v...
Given that wires can also be cut, is that worth it given the extra cost to install?
A better solution might be for alarm to be triggered if traffic from cameras is lost (although that would create a lot of false triggers)
Proper camera deployment includes redundancy in camera viewpoints. If you're cutting a camera's cable, I'm seeing you cut it from at least one other camera on property.
First off if the wires can be reached the installation is a failure. My cameras are up high with all wiring well out of reach or in metal conduit. Getting near the wiring also means theives get closer to cameras setting of motion sensing algos wasting time and risk making a racket trying to climb up to disable them.
Wifi is useful for many things - just not anything security related.
A friend did this - he hid the DVR in a space under his steps then took a cheap dead DVR, gutted it and shoved an RPi in to run Firefox and the DVR web UI. Even set it up in with a monitor and mouse on top. He left the old HDD in there for weight too.
One thing to think about though, he had a NAS box in his office next to the router on a table and I said, what if they take that thinking its the DVR? That is now under the steps too.
> Any room with a safe should have EMF shielding.
You just made the target that much more visible.
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