>Wi-Fi jammers have become a common tool of theft gangs
How do these work? (I made this account to ask this)
How do these work? (I made this account to ask this)
The advantage is that it works on the protocol level, so you don't have to nuke the entire spectrum for the entire neighbourhood (which would attract attention)
It's not really "secure" in the academic sense of the word, but many devices record the BSSID along with the SSID to be a little more safe from hijacking.
It's trivial to spoof the BSSID if you're an attacker since it's something that's just advertised wirelessly.
Why do phones/laptops continually broadcast a list of all SSIDs they have ever connected?
https://blog.spacehuhn.com/probe-request
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi...
I'll see your conspiratorial bent and raise you: why is iPXE enabled by default?
maybe a form of planned obsolescence to sell routers with WPA3 support
intelligence agencies plugging agents into standards bodies is also not unheard of
Malicious clients/APs need much less energy to DoS a network Wi-Fi network. WPA3 adds optional PMF (802.11w) to protect against rogue deauth over WPA2. Also, not deploying 802.11r but deploying WPA-3 only mode and device/user cert-based 802.1x auth also help.
Sure, but compliant Wifi devices use miniscule transmit power. If you're a criminal you can easily hook up a car battery/generator to a 1000 W transmitter and cover a pretty wide area, or use a directional antenna to focus it a bit more on your target. These sorts of jammers definitely exist, too. Downside though is you're also lighting a huge beacon that says "HELLO I AM DOING SOMETHING ILLEGAL", so you will not be able to keep it up forever. Protocol-based attacks are more discrete, but newer APs (especially enterprise) have countermeasures.
I dunno how legit they are but a Google search finds examples claiming a 20 W jammer can cover 500 meters. I'm skeptical that's accurate but it's probably within an order of magnitude. Enough to cover a house, and a large transmitter would plausibly be able to block out a larger facility.
Adding a couple of thoughts I had while reading it:
- If the criminals' jamming only needs to protect their identity when people look at footage in the future (as opposed to taking offline a large facility's entire network of cameras so that security can't tell where the criminals are in real time) then they could potentially carry the jammer with them, in which case it just needs to be strong enough to block any camera within sight rather than the full building
- In addition to scaling the power of a jammer to take out a big enough area, they could place multiple jammers around the location, either to combine to a larger area or to expand on your directional antenna idea to target individual networked items (cameras, routers, whatever). Even if having many of them means there isn't time to collect them all again when leaving, assuming the crime's pay-off is significant then it could easily still be cost-effective to consider them single use jammers (I'm assuming it wouldn't be hard for people smart enough to plan this sort of crime to make sure that the left-behind jammers can't be traced back to them as an easy solve for the police).
Jammers also aren't super expensive and don't need to be supervised, it's entirely possible a thief could just leave a big one in a trash can or something and then abandon it.
All that said though I don't think this is a credible threat against anywhere with minimum legitimate security. Everything should be hardwired and battery backed up in any reasonable security system. It's mostly a thing that would effect cheap residential systems.
My guess would be that A is legal and B might not be, but I've never had reason to look up the relevant laws and I don't know if it would be the same in different countries either.
But yeah, I doubt most purchases of portable jammers are for legal use.
a) I've never been quite sure. People do testing in Faraday cages so there has to be some exception. I'm pretty sure as long as you aren't interfering externally and are being responsible nobody is gonna fine you.
What you can't do is operate a business and fill the lobby for example with jammers that wipe out cell phone service and then require people to pay for access via WiFi.
Ideally a well-designed camera would buffer locally when its WiFi path is down. But there's always limits there and I suppose if the criminal started the jamming a bit before entering line of sight, it should work. Then again I suppose most security cameras probably don't buffer at all or just barely enough to smooth out a network hiccup.
- HN Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Or if you're going to post a shallow dismissal, at least say something interesting about why you're dismissing, unlike your comment which literally adds nothing to the conversation and doesn't educate anyone who doesn't already know what led you to your opinion.
* But I'm not god, nor am I perfection personified, you're very welcome to disagree with my opinion. (Though to be completely honest I am a bit surprised that two people replied disagreeing with me, I'd expected my view that the comment didn't belong on this site wouldn't be controversial, so maybe my judgement is off in this case. But I've not been convinced to change my mind.)