The Los Angeles Police Department has warned residents to be wary of thieves using technology to break into homes undetected. High-tech burglars have apparently knocked out their victims’ wireless cameras and alarms in the Los Angeles Wilshire-area neighborhoods before getting away with swag bags full of valuables. An LAPD social media post highlights the Wi-Fi jammer-supported burglaries and provides a helpful checklist of precautions residents can take.
Criminals can easily find the hardware for Wi-Fi jamming online. It can also be cheap, with prices starting from $40. However, jammers are illegal to use in the U.S.
We have previously reported on Wi-Fi jammer-assisted burglaries in Edina, Minnesota. Criminals deployed Wi-Fi jammer(s) to ensure homeowners weren’t alerted of intrusions and that incriminating video evidence wasn’t available to investigators.
That screen capture looks like the beginning of a rap video.
Why did they specifically mention to “secure home DVR recorders”?
Other than potentially losing some TV or movies, is that really a big deal next to the other items they mention? It seems really odd to mention one of the least important things.
No. Think about it. Where is all the video from those cameras going? It is digital video, which the homeowner probably wants to record and playback… Many home security setups, particularly those that don’t rely on a cloud service, are basically a DVR back end with a security focused UI.
I’ve never heard of used outside of a cable box. I didn’t know security setups would be called that.
But with that information it makes sense.
You made me one of the 10k today
Worked at an old job where one guy, that had access to the router settings, would disable the Blink Cameras so he could forge his time cards.
Owners ended up realizing the cameras would only be disabled when he was on shift.
I worked at Walmart ages ago and one of the overnight assistant managers would do this and then steal cash out of the cash office until he finally got caught.
Don’t use wireless for security, PoE or CCTV
Yes, if you have a $10M villa in LA where you store your priceless art collection invest in hard security. For the average person who just needs video for the insurance company for when some meth head steals their bike from the garage, it’s a great solution.
IMHO, it comes down to your risk, what will make you feel comfortable, and how much money you want to spend. Pulling Ethernet through the walls and patching drywall might not be something you care to do if risk is low.
Also, if someone really wants to not be on camera, they’ll wear a mask, turn the power off at the main panel, etc. That said, there are cameras that can run on battery and store footage locally when they can’t phone home to wherever they deposit video files.
My entire 12 camera system is ethernet only which feeds into my server closet and backed up with a battery that can run it for 5 hours. The video clips are sent to telegram for backup.
Uh, how do you use telegram for backup?
You can create and set up telegram bots for your own use
Right, but they offer basically unlimited storage or how does that specific bit work? I wasn’t aware you could put meaningful amounts of data anywhere using a telegram bot.
Those aren’t always options for renters, hence why wifi security systems are so popular.
Lawful- Neutral renter reporting in:
- Fresh paint and a lot of putty hide a lot of sins
- Magic erasers ARE magic
- Home improvement stores just like sell door trim, hardware, etc and they’ll color match paint
- Most post-inspectors are looking for egregious issues or evidence of a bad fix/cleanup. That’s now your threshold for quality
I fixed an entire doorframe trim and drywall after the back door got kicked in - paint and putty are your friends
Even beyond renting, installing a wifi camera is SO much cheaper than running Ethernet all over your house. And if you need it run through an external wall? Even more money.
Even beyond renting, installing a wifi camera is SO much cheaper than running Ethernet all over your house. And if you need it run through an external wall? Even more money.
A bit of plastic trunking, an ethernet cable, and a long masonry bit for your hammer drill to get through the brick wall, oh and a little sealant, not that expensive, I believe in you!
I’m gonna fall through the ceiling :(
That’s not cute, it’s tragic
Not that expensive to do it yourself. Getting a fish tape and a cheaper Ethernet termination kit would set you back at most $50. Only other tools you need is a drill and most homeowners should already have that. And a really long bit is cheap at harbour freight.
Not if you DIY. I just finished a project, not only wiring all rooms for Ethernet, but PoE for 10 exterior cameras.
You can get 500ft Cat 5e boxes off eBay for like ~$20, an extra long 1/2 inch drill bit (for punching through the exterior wall) was like another 20. Most expensive part was probably the metal conduit for the outside runs (I decided to only have 2 or 3 holes to the outside and run the cables in the conduit along the soffit to converge to one of 3 exterior holes for final routing within the house. That was probably 150-250)
All in all after estimating for secondary costs, like screws, brackets, sealant, a caulk gun, ceiling bracket for ceiling routing indoors etc this project was probably <400, pretty cheap as far as home improvement projects go
You can save on all that conduit with direct burial Ethernet.
Do you really need either when you’re running the cable down the soffit where it’ll never really get exposed to sun or rain?
No - I use some standard stuff in areas like that, when I’m able to come right out and under the soffit or siding. If I have to make a run, closer to the ground, with a brick facade, I’ll use it. I won’t go crazy actually trying to burry it when it stays near my house hidden by shrubs.
I have buried it for customers that require connections located in dislocated structures - trenches and filling by others though. 😅
Good because I didn’t use either and also tucked mine up in the soffit albeit with some short runs before they go into the attic. It is not something I’d like to revisit 😆
Yep. We have a mix of wifi/hard wired PoE. If you can handle crawling around in the attic or wherever, PoE is the easiest and best option. No need to run wiring to any sort of electrical box to power 110v for cams. Wireless is super-easy, but usually you have to pay for cloud services on top of that. Home hard wired with an NVR or NAS is the way to go.
Wireless is super-easy,
Oh, having to pay for cloud services is TIGHT!
You’re confusing easy with cheap.
Most people these days have either a ring doorbell camera or nothing. A very few people have real security cameras hardwired, and even fewer of those have more than 1 camera.
Also, about 1/4 of the ring doorbell cams need their batteries replaced.
PoE/CCTV is def the better option, but youre gonna be hard pressed to get regular folks to make the switch unless this type of burglary becomes endemic.
Renters have virtually no choice here. I hate it when people state this like it’s some damn easy thing for everyone to do.
Honestly super easy. I have a pet cam that records locally to an SD card and is accessible via wifi. A jammer wouldn’t stop the recording. Also like 30 bucks vs 50-100-200 bucks depending on which ring cam you get. Certainly not weatherized but good enough for internal monitoring.
Honestly super easy.
Would you go so far as to say it’s barely an inconvenience?
The landlord might have an incentive to protect their investment
Burglars stealing whole apartments over here.
Can’t have shit in Detroit.
There are some that have local storage in case wifi drops out.
I beg to differ not with that attitude. In most situations you can non permanently get a camera out a window or door without harming anything / risking deposit loss. Only where you have no windows near exit points and a windowless door. But even then you can still atleast have something internal to catch a break in (wired streaming to web).
There’s no OSFA solution. Yeah, it sucks if you’re renting and can’t run cat 6 everywhere. All the same, you can still run a hard wired cam to a NVR/NAS in at least one location inside, but then you face the same difficulty anyone else does of securing the storage from theft - or you can have it upload to a cloud as quickly as is practical so you get off-site storage images and alerts of the theft.
There’s a lot of opportunistic thefts near where I live. Honestly, the odds of actually catching a good image of the thieves’ faces are petty low. If they know enough to jam the wifi, they also probably know enough to hide their faces. The thieves in our area all wear hoodies and hide their faces somehow, so all you get is the alert that someone is there and an image of a hoodied individual.
The real answer is caching. Instead of writing video to the cloud live and losing all recordings during a wifi outage, it should just cash the last 30ish minutes in case of failure to connect to the cloud. Then once the connection is up again, it just uploads the cached video.
My cameras are PoE going to an NVR but you can also slap SD cards in them to record locally. I’m sure there are some wireless options out there with this feature included. Unfortunately wireless cameras have another glaring flaw in that they only record on movement and I’ve heard of so many stories where they didn’t catch any movement to start recording when something happened.
Easy or not, wireless isn’t secure.
Neither is PoE when the thieves drop a bit of foil onto the local transformer with a drone.
I’m not saying this is what the backup batteries on my modem and in my rack are specifically for, but it would definitely prevent downtime from a Droney McTinFoil von Transformer scenario
Droney McTinFoil von Transformer Optimus prime’s HS nickname
That’s a hell of a lot higher bar to cross than wifi.
Wireless “security” cameras are never a good practice.
Right?? I don’t understand this attack. People are lazy and far too trusting to have their home feeds uploaded over the internet
Cheap wireless cloud connected security cameras are the reason home surveillance is so ubiquitous today. Many people don’t have the know-how to install POE cameras, or it’d cost them too much to pay someone to do it. Plus, if you’re renting your house, putting the holes you’d need where they’re supposed to go is something you might not even be allowed to do.
I fully understand the attack. It’s effective against the majority of people.
It’s one of the easier things to DIY though, much easier than setting up a printer or installing a TV. Also, it’s about the same price if not cheaper, I got 1tb harddrive, 4 cameras, cables and and OS for under $200
I’m just tired of these excuses on why we give away our data and then are surprised when their security is trash
It’s one of the easier things to DIY though, much easier than setting up a printer or installing a TV
I don’t think that’s true at all, and also like I said before if you rent it’s literally not an option unless you can do it without drilling holes.
Also, it’s about the same price if not cheaper, I got 1tb harddrive, 4 cameras, cables and and OS for under $200
Well no, a Wyze cam is like $25. So that’s not “The same price if not cheaper”, it’s twice the cost.
I’m not familiar with Wyze but Ring and Nest doorbells go for $50-$200 per camera plus a month subscription if they want to keep the data, so still cheaper
And they do have magnets to allow for non drilling options if that’s a requirement. I should also stipulate if the person installing it has the physical ability, the setting up the computer side is easy enough for a novice and simpler than installing Windows/MacOSX
My argument is not go the easy, convenient route. Fast food is nice in a pinch, but eating it every day leads to bad outcomes. And I’m not saying the consumer is 100% to blame, but they aren’t innocent bystanders, especially if they are spending money to protect valuables, why not learn which tools are available and when to use what
$25 + subscription and/or SD card
i know nothing; would a hardwired connection from the cameras to the router solve this?
Yes.
yes, assuming the cables are inaccessible from outside. otherwise it would be easy to cut them.
If you are close enough to cut cables, they already have you on video.
Yes but the camera should be in a place that can’t be physically tampered with easily since someone could theoretically unplug the camera and plug into your home network and see all your computers or other devices as if they had stolen your WiFi password. A small risk but it’s better to hardwire it somewhere they would need a ladder to get to or get a camera system that connects to a central box inside the house.
Well, if it’s not on a WiFi network, it’ll be fine. CCTV is a great example of this. Just wire up some cameras, encrypt the harddrive and put it somewhere difficult to get to. Only way to disable all cameras at once would be an EMP. There are kits for a few hundred $ and all the data stays local
Or just flip off the main switch on your breaker if they can get to that.
Totally. Get a PSU? Or use solar with a PSU. Or batteries. Always a mitigation for the mitigation lol
Me being cheap pays off; wifi cameras are expensive as fuck so I just have wired ones that don’t do anything on the Internet.
While still hating this living dystopia, I do appreciate some of cyberpunk headlines we get.
In my big American metro area, the burglars usually mask up and roll in with swapped plates, a car they stole, or a car they got off a Kia boy for $100-$200. They’re tough to catch in the act or identify with video surveillance, even with a new hardwired or pre-WiFi hardwired system.
Own a musket for home defense, since that’s what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. “What the devil?” As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. I blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he’s dead on the spot. I draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it’s smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, “Tally ho lads” the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
All of my cameras are hard wired. It’s going to take a lot of power to jam those.
You’d be surprised. A CB radio with a high wattage amplifier is enough to scramble analog hardwired cameras when its keyed up.
I regularly transmit 100 watts on HF using a dipole over my house. That’s never knocked any of my IP cameras out. It’s going to take more power than that, especially if you want to stay far enough away that the cameras can’t get good video of you.
I’m talking semis with ~1000 watt linears. And analog hardwired cameras. I can watch it happen at work.
before getting away with swag bags full of valuables
So just look for the guy who looks like he’s just been to four different network admin conferences?
Bill, where did you get these 37 easy buttons?
Sick, where do I get those jammers?
I’m not gonna rob anyone, I just don’t want cameras working nearby me.
Smash microwave oven window and you got a very powerful jammer
Hey it tickles
You do realize it stops wifi in general from working, not just the cameras
It doesn’t even stop the cameras, which would continue to record and save in their SD cards locally.
Ones that have that feature. Some popular cheaper brands (e.g. Ring) the individual cameras can’t support SD cards but the base station can but they need wifi to be able to do that.
Ring is not a cheap camera. The $20 Chinese cloud cameras sold on Amazon are extremely common and they all have MicroSD card slots as a backup option.
If I’m out in the world around unfriendly cameras I’m probably not on Wifi anyway. And yes, I know all the reasons they’re illegal, this isn’t completely serious.
The thieves are jamming WiFi systems and the comments on the article and on Lemmy seem to blame the victim for not being tech savvy. The bulk of Nest/Ring customers do so because the app is easy to use and the cameras easy to setup. By definition the victims are far less likely to be able to defend against this kind of jamming attack.
If the next step in escalation is to shut down the power to the house, will the victim be blamed for not having home batteries and solar panels?
Why not question the viability of WiFi systems in general? Has video ever been more than a deterrent to those scared of cameras? Fearless thieves who know how to deter the systems get free loot for their trouble.
Treat security like we did before 2010; improve physical security to defend instead of relying on deterrence.
Can’t go wrong with a german sheppard.
Until he gets bored and starts gnawing on the linoleum
LAPD is recommending cutting back shrubbery and coordinating with neighbors for extended leave… As a Los Angeles native, neither of these things happen. After all, high walls make for good neighbors.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense.
I tried to get the formatting right, but oh well
I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do what I did. I have a WiFi doorbell camera but I also have 13 other cameras that cover the entire perimeter of my house connected to a PoE switch. My switch is on an UPS and connected to an outlet my natural gas generator cutover powers. My office (includes my miniPC running HAOS and frigate) is also on an UPS plugged into outlets my generator cutover powers in a locked cage inside a vented drawer with a 120mm exhaust fan to keep air circulation going in the drawer. All motion is recorded and saved to my local NAS (that is in the same locked cage) for 30 days and it syncs the recordings directory to the cloud. I have isolated cameras that look like usb chargers that record motion on a loop to 128GB micro sd cards aimed at all entry/exit points, hallways, and points is interest. Everything is pretty much set it and forget it. I get notified of any motion on my property regardless of my location and the jpeg captures are immediately sent to a dedicated email I setup should something unforeseen happens to the recorded video. If my or my partners cell phone is not on the WiFi all the cameras (except the doorbell and isolated ones) are set to siren mode on movement detection and they are surprisingly loud especially if two or three are going off at once.
You’ve absolutely nailed the smug tone some of the comments here have, good work.
Also, imagine explaining all that to my mum, you’d be there all week.
I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do what I did.
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Your setup is fucking insane, and I mean that in a good way. As someone who ran a small team focused on security and who entertained more than one “I totally sploited our OS/let me show you how we suck today so we can fix it” conversations with dizzyingly smart zealots, this setup has excellent layering and coverage. Well fucking done.
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Cost. The same people who say “I’m on a pension so they can’t steal much from me” without realizing their retirement savings and credit rating are the golden fucking goose, also won’t see the benefits to such a cost in capital and setup labour. They won’t do it, and they’ll see us as nutcases until the leopards have eaten their face.
Also, thank you, that’s nice to hear from someone in that line if business
I very much doubt they genuinely have all that, this is pretty obviously sarcasm.
I was making a joke using the absurdity of what I put together as a hobby project over the past couple years as an example to reinforce the comment I replied to. I’ve spent my whole career in IT and it’s absurd the level of knowledge a lot of career or even hobbyist IT folks expect the general public to have.
My generator cost $8k installed.
I ran all the cables myself, still cost $1k for the materials.
Doorbell camera $200.
PoE cameras averages to $174 each or ~$2,500
UPS’s: $300 combined
MiniPC: $500
Cage and mounts: $150
Isolated cameras: $30 ea
SD cards: $15 ea
All told I have over $13k invested easily and it would easily be over twice as much without knowing how to do it myself. Anyone giving folks shit for using WiFi security systems is out of touch.
Fence with a lock on it is a lot cheaper. Crazy how much people will spend on surveillance, given how little it does to achieve deterrence.
I got insurance. I’d help load the truck rather than get shot if someone broke into my house and I was home. This has mostly been a fun project hobby that I can continuously tinker with while working in my office from home. I’ve had a lot of trouble finding a hobby I’m able to stick to that is mentally challenging and rewarding to me. The progressive learning has been great and has me excited to continue with further integration. That said. I will have evidence for police and insurance. I also enjoy watching the deer and other wildlife without going outside which tends to change their behavior.
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You just said HAOS and Frigate, and “set it and forget it” in the same statement. As a long time user of both I call shenanigans.
I also think you overestimate the ability of the average person. My mom barely knows how to work her Ring doorbell camera.
That was one of my attempts at playing my hand that I was being sarcastic. I tinker with the shit weekly and yes it is way beyond what any reasonable person should be expected to invest or understand. It’s just become a hobby of mine and I was trying to be funny, which I’m not very good at.
If my or my partners cell phone is not on the WiFi all the cameras (except the doorbell and isolated ones) are set to siren mode on movement detection
Is this something you coded, or are there security camera brands that support it natively?
The only part I coded was sending the api calls to cameras to turn on/off siren mode. I relied on a lot of other folks reverse engineering to help me along.
Family members will think twice about masturbating in your house.
Nah, they’ll just do it while staring directly at the camera. Gotta get that eye contact.
Yeah, it’s not really a spike in burglaries so much as a spike in a specific tool being used in burglaries. Whether they use a brick, wifi jammer or a gun they were going to rob someone someway…
Or a hoodie. I’m not sure why it’s a big g deal to WiFi jam a video doorbell when you can also defeat it with a hoodie …. Plus that’s not a burglar alarm.
Whoever is peddling anything as a burglar alarm that depends on WiFi is the real criminal
FCC is gunna start blasting
My cameras have antennas on them but use Ethernet.
Physical locks, physical keys. We are collectively becoming too “smart” for our own good
Physical locks and keys are also easy to bypass.
Not sure how that’ll help with doorbells and cameras not working?
