I read a few of the news articles and it sounds like the thieves are jamming WiFi and the sensors. This prevents the system from even triggering. The thieves are walking around the homes without the glass break, door, and motion sensors going off it seems.
Not commonplace, but getting some exposure in the news recently – gangs of organized thieves in metro Detroit area are targeting upper scale homes for burglaries. They are purportedly using wifi jammer to circumvent alarms (like Ring).
What can millions of Ring (and customers from other wifi-dependent alarm companies) do about this? IS there a viable counter to these signal jammer? Maybe it’s time to explore legacy, analog wired alarm solutions as backup instead of the reverse?
They’re using a wifi jammer, according to this article. No obvious way to prevent this, so hardwired systems would be the only resistant option.
Most Wi-Fi jammers use disassociation flooding to kick the devices off the network. This attack is prevented with WPA3 which can use protected management frames. Unfortunately Ring still hasn’t got around to adding WPA3 support to its devices. It was requested via their feature request process a long time ago, so I’m not overly hopeful they’ll add it.
There are trade offs and risks with each security system. There’s also different types of burglars from opportune amateurs to seasoned pros.
If you’re concerned about this threat, there’s a raft of solutions out there with high definition footage without any reliance on Wi-Fi or internet.
Whatever they’re using for jamming must go beyond the WiFi frequencies to affect z-wave and whatever frequency Honeywell et al uses for their RF communications.
This makes sense because most alarm systems these days (even ADT/Brinx/etc) rely mostly on wireless sensors.
This is a huge vulnerability because it’s pretty rare to find a security system that’s been installed to use all hardwired sensors. To go hardwired you probably had to have it built-in as the house was built or did it while doing some major remodeling.
Cellular jammers are readily available. DSL, cable, or fiber are not jammable, but all devices need to be hardwired.
Zwave can be jammed just as easily as wifi. Cellular is great but if the door/window sensors are blocked and unable to report to the base station, the alarm won’t think anything is wrong.
What I found when doing some simple research over the last couple of days is that different manufacturers use different frequencies for their devices so it might be a guessing game for the burglar, although my guess is that the professional burglars carry jammers for most of the common frequencies used by the big name brands like Ring, Simplisafe, Nest(ADT), etc.
To me it makes sense to have devices from different brands. Ring doorbell, ADT alarm, Wyze cameras, etc…
What’s scary is that there are a bunch of videos on youtube demonstrating how easy it is to bypass these alarms AND with instructions telling you exactly how to do it and how to get the jammers.
Is this pervasive? If you watch the news, it’s pretty evident thieves aren’t concerned with cameras. They mask up and hood up and go. Be on alert, they have no fear.
Burglars can use wide-band jammers to jam all frequency bands : GSM, LTE, Wifi and Z-Wave. Some alarm systems are robust to such attacks (like Ajax Alarm System — https://ajax.systems/blog/what-is-jamming/).
In short, the alarm hub must be hardwired with Ethernet to your router; And hub, router and modem on a battery backup. Then, only communications between sensors and hub can be jammed.
Then, alarm hub communicates frequently with sensors. If communication fails, it signals a jamming attack, notifying the user via hardwired Internet. With a working speaker on the hub, it can sound a siren and send a voice alert to the intruders.
SimpliSafe system is another system that offers some jamming protection, but lacks the Ethernet hardwired connection, so it must rely on a GSM/LTE link, which is still better than Wifi alone.
