Can you protect yourself in this smart phone world?

Read this carefully and remember: from now on you will be watched. Does it sound awesome or scary to you? Take a good look at the stranger at the other end of the hall. Although it looks like he’s talking on his smartphone, he actually takes pictures of you using a special app. And thats just the beginning. At that morning meeting last Tuesday, when you made that outrageous joke about your new boss, your colleague’s smartphone, lying quietly at the table, recorded every word you said. Later that night when you were in the restaurant and made a flirtatious but innocent joke on the waitress, someone videotaped the entire interaction.

At first glance, it seems that there is nothing you can do to prevent things like this from happening again and again. Millions of smartphones around the world mean millions of active recording devices ready to quickly capture any word or movement. And when these recordings are made, it is no big deal to throw pictures, videos or audios on the internet and share them with everyone. Maybe there is some way to prevent all of this from happening? Let’s see. Perhaps someone smart enough will create a cloak of invisibility like in fantasy films, or companies may use clues from James Bond films and develop high-tech counter-surveillance devices that allow us to move around in public without worrying about potential privacy issues having to worry.

In fact, it might be the companies we already know well, especially since there is already some type of technology that I am talking about. For example, late last year Apple patented a new technology that allows an iPhone’s camera to be easily deactivated using infrared sensors aimed at the camera. It was developed to prevent film piracy. But even ordinary people can use such a device in advance. Todd Morris, founder and chief executive of surveillance and surveillance company BrickHouse Security, said some early technologies existed to protect people from intentional recording. For example, any woman can use a wireless camera detector in the locker room to find out if a hidden camera is installed in her clothing. Yes, that happens and quite a bit.

gsm network jammers

There are some limits, however, as the changing room or business office is completely different from the large and crowded public place. For example, if you use this Apple device that disables the camera, you will definitely make a lot of people feel harassed just to imagine some sights or to take photos to remember friends. The same is partly true for gsm jammer, but it can vary from place to place (for example, the cinema must definitely have such devices in order to make the visitor’s experience uninterrupted and thus even better).

“While you don’t wear a fake mustache or stocking over your head, no one in a large crowd can prevent them from being secretly pictured,” claimed Todd Morris. “In these cases, we need to use our technology to fight technology only at the server level using algorithms that say,” Don’t post this photo of me on the internet. “” If these companies can tag someone on the internet by simply recognizing their voice or even their face, they should be able to remove them the same way. However, when everyone starts using those Google glasses and other augmented reality glasses, we will face the new type of surveillance as they are likely to record everything they see.

Will Israel buy $ 50,000 worth of portable anti-drone vests?

The IDF and Israeli police are considering purchasing personal anti-drone systems at a cost of $ 50,000 each, Calcalist reported.

The vests were made by the Israeli startup SKYUP, part of the Avnon Group, and have already been sold to the US Army and NATO forces.

Enemy drones have become a growing threat and unlike in the past when they were only installed in vehicles, there is now a need for personal equipment for soldiers and police officers to protect them from the threat of drones. According to SKYLOCK, the portable systems, which weigh just 1.5 kilograms, can neutralize any drone within a kilometer.

3 bands uav blocker

The vests are equipped with a drone detector and an drone jammer. Upon notification of a UAV in their vicinity, carriers can activate the anti-drone jammer.

The vest is intended for use in situations where traditional anti-drone products normally installed in buildings or vehicles are not suitable due to the need for a mobile protection system, e.g. B. at special units of the army or guards of the president.

A quick and dirty guide to monitoring mobile phones during protests

As riots against police brutality and institutionalized racism swept across the country, many people were exposed to the full power of law enforcement weapons and surveillance for the first time. Whenever protesters, cell phones and police are in the same place, protesters should pay attention to cell phone surveillance. Usually, security practitioners or other protesters respond to this issue through suggestions provided by local law enforcement agencies using cell location simulators (also known as CSS, IMSI catchers, stingrays, earth boxes, hail, fake base stations, or crosses). However, in many cases, this suggestion is wrong, or it is due to fundamental reasons such as not knowing what the cellular base station simulator is, its function and frequency of use.

Denial of service or signal interference is an additional function of CSS. In fact, the FBI has admitted that CSS can cause signal jammer to local personnel. Unfortunately, for the same reasons, it is difficult to determine the use of CSS, and it is difficult to tell how often they interrupt service, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Signal towers that look like signal interference may also be overloaded and disconnected. If many people suddenly gather in one place, it may overload the network, which is not the purpose of the design.

Professional high-power interceptor

How to protect yourself from cellular signals

As we mentioned in our self-defense guide for monitoring protesters, the best way to protect yourself from cellular site simulators is to put your phone in airplane mode and then turn off GPS [2], WiFi and Bluetooth, and cellular data. (Although “receive only” GPS and not lose its own location information, many apps track GPS location data, which is ultimately stored in a database that law enforcement agencies can search for later.)

We know that some IMSI capturers can also intercept content, but as far as we know, if you don’t downgrade your cellular connection to 2G, none of them can do it. If you want to protect your device from this attack, the best option is to use encrypted messages such as Signal or WhatsApp and put it in airplane mode when you find that your phone has fallen to 2G. (There are many valid reasons. Your phone may downgrade some of your connections to 2G, but it is safer than regretting.) However, an important part of the protest may be live broadcast/recording and immediate upload of police reports against protesters. Violent video. This is inconsistent with the recommendation to keep the phone off/in airplane mode. Up to you

Unfortunately, iOS and Android currently do not provide an easy way to force your phone to use 4G only, although developers can of course add it to their operating systems. If you can turn off 2G on your phone, this is a good preventive measure.

GIDAS’s real-time interference detection makes the navigation system safer

It is estimated that there are currently the same number of navigation receivers on Earth as humans. Positions, navigation and time signals from space-based constellations such as Galileo and GPS form an invisible, indispensable infrastructure that lays the foundation for many modern aspects of modern life (communication, energy, and transportation).

Satellite navigation is helping to control more and more planes, ships, trains and self-driving cars. At the same time, navigation-based time stamps can mark real financial transactions worth billions of euros and coordinate the synchronization of the grid. Satellite navigation is always active and available anywhere on the planet. Therefore, it is easy to take usability for granted. These signals from space are equally important, and they are also susceptible to ground interference.

Andreas Lesch of OHB Digital Solutions in Austria said: “It’s just a matter of output power.” “The navigation signal on the ground corresponds to the light of the 60-watt lamp on the satellite. For Galileo, its distance in space is about 23,222 kilometers. These weaker signals may be accidentally or deliberately destroyed by stronger local radio signals or even misleading false navigation signals (so-called deception).”

“We have developed a new GNSS interference detection and analysis system, GIDAS, to protect critical infrastructure from damage or deception by continuously monitoring important signal frequency bands. In this way, GIDAS can trigger alarms in real time, determine the nature of the failure, and then determine the cause of the failure. The location of those dangerous portable devices so that the authorities can take immediate remedial measures.”

Although at least three stations are required to locate interference sources connected to the entire monitoring center, GIDAS can provide interference detection and orientation through a single reporting station. Monitoring centers can also be connected to each other, which makes the GIDAS system easy to expand, from ensuring a single port, airport or key location of the system to the entire city or region.

Although at least three stations are required to locate the interference source connected to the entire monitoring center, GIDAS can provide interference detection and orientation through a single reporting station. (Photo: ESA)

gps wifi cell phone jammers

“People are only catching up with the severity of this problem now,” Andreas added. “In parts of Europe, the highest density surveys show about three to four signal jammers per hour.

These small devices are technically illegal, but can be purchased online for a few hundred dollars or less, and are usually sold as data protection devices. The sales range of the jammer is only a few meters, but the actual use range may reach tens of meters or more, which may cause unnecessary widespread interference. For example, the famous American truck driver takes the jammer while sailing at Newark Airport as long as he passes. Will shut down the system.

Could the police actually shut down a city’s cellular service?

At around 1 am on Monday, a strange tweet claimed that Washington, DC had been disconnected from the digital world. The Washington Post later reported that the Twitter accounts of only three followers were the first to report a suspected interruption. When people wake up and register online, #DCblackout is all the rage in the United States. The hashtag appeared in thousands of tweets, accompanied by reports of explosions, missing protesters and silencers of police rifles. What followed was a brief online chaos: Did the police really block the cell phone tower? What should the so-called failure cover? The local reporter quickly tweeted that they had not experienced any failures, and later that day, the rumors were thoroughly debunked. It turns out that a power outage is the highest level of error message. This also dispersed the interference of local protests. The local police used violent methods against the protesters all night, including pepper spray, rubber bullets and tear gas.

However, the prerequisite for the power outage is that the police (or the federal government) can completely shut down the communication network-this behavior has seriously affected the freedom of speech and assembly rights, as well as the safety of protesters and passersby. Although it did not happen on Monday, the joke raised the question of whether it is possible for law enforcement agencies to cause technical and legal power outages.

Americans tend to view deliberate service interruption as a dangerous strategy used by oppressive regimes abroad. In a speech by the American Civil Liberties Union, Jay Stanley, a senior political analyst for the Privacy and Technology Project, told me that interruptions in communication are often seen as “a terrible form of abuse” and are used worldwide to cover up repression of sexual violence and other violations. Human rights behavior. ”

But this form of censorship has occurred at least once in the United States. In 2011, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) suspended cell phone service at a subway station in downtown San Francisco after hearing about plans to protest the BART police’s plan to kill a man. The purpose of BART is to prevent protesters from coordinating, but it is short-sighted, thus making the agency the center of freedom of speech controversy across the country. The Federal Communications Commission intervened, and BART’s actions were condemned by human rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the incident was called the “BART La Mubarak in San Francisco” incident). The FCC investigated BART, but like Harold Feld, the senior vice president of non-profit public knowledge told me that the committee decided not to make a declarative decision on the incident. This boils down to a technical problem: BART actually shuts down the service by shutting down the equipment in the underground system instead of destroying the signal.

No similar incidents have been confirmed since, but in the 2016 Tateishi protests, Wired reported that tribal leaders believed that the police had blocked their phones. The problem with proving these claims is that it is difficult to determine whether malicious behavior is occurring or just a bad signal. Only agencies like the FCC have not yet investigated the claims to truly verify the occurrence of traffic congestion.

smartphone signal blocker

The BART controversy and, to a lesser extent, the Standing Rock controversy, both show how complicated the shutdown signal can be in the United States-and how we truly fail to understand and resolve the blueprint for current and future law enforcement blackouts. What we do know is that almost ten years later, it is still possible from a technical point of view. According to Joshua M. Pearce, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Michigan Technological Institute, there are two ways to cause ground blackouts. (Turning off BART is an unusual situation because the authorities can access the device themselves.) The first is to ask (or require) the service provider to shut down a specific set of cell phone towers. It’s as simple as flipping a switch

The second method (and the more difficult method) is to use jamming technology, which sometimes sends false signals, overwhelming the signal from the cell phone tower. Small short-range equipment can be purchased abroad (for example, equipment used by some overseas universities to stop fraud, which led to the suspension of a high school teacher in Florida in 2015). In theory, you can use a large number of such small devices to call neighbors, but this is not convenient. Pearce believes that signal jammer have greater coverage, but only organizations like the National Security Agency own them.

Analysis: Mini GPS jammer

If you spend enough time browsing eBay to break down interesting electronic gadgets, you’re bound to see suggestions for some questionable gadgets. This is how I recently became aware of these tiny GPS jammer that plug directly into an automotive 12v socket. Delivered to your doorstep for less than $ 10, it seemed like a perfect device to rip open in the name of science.

pocket gps signal jammer

Now you may be wondering what legitimate uses such a device could have. As far as I know there aren’t any. The only reason you’d want to interfere with GPS signals in and around a vehicle is if you’re trying to get away with something that you shouldn’t be doing. Perhaps you’re driving a haunted company car and want a quick two hour nap in a parking lot, or you might want to disable the car’s built-in GPS that you stole just long enough for you to take it to the car store. You know how to do it.

However, we are not going to delve into the potentially nefarious reasons this device exists. Hackers have never been too picky about the devices they investigate and experiment with, and there is no reason why we should start now. Instead, let’s take this gray area hardware for a test drive and see what moves it.

While the GPS constellation’s average altitude of 20,200 km (12,550 miles) may not be quite as high as that of communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, they are still quite a long way off. Given this incredible distance and the size of the antenna on most GPS equipped devices, it’s no wonder the received signal is very weak. So weak, in fact, that it is generally below the noise floor. Only with clever algorithms and a dash of wizardry can your phone turn that whisper from the stars into something that resembles useful information.

It is this fragility that makes this type of inexpensive jammer possible. It doesn’t take much to overwhelm the legitimate signal. Remember, a device like this does not attempt to mimic a GPS satellite, but simply emits loud enough nonsense that the real satellite can no longer be heard.

When the jammer is on, we can clearly see how the already meager signal is absolutely wiped out by the patterns sent by the device.

There is just no competition. The legitimate signal is tens of thousands of miles away, and this thing is screaming its head within easy reach. I haven’t tested the range of this device, mainly because I didn’t want it to be turned on for longer than necessary, but it is capable of doing the deed at least several meters.

Surveillance technology is more advanced than you think

Spurred on by the well-known terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, modern surveillance has become an even more important method of protecting people from possible acts of terrorism or of eliminating acts of dissident. And there is no shortage of companies willing to provide the mechanism that can safely do these tasks.

Some of these tech companies have tools that allow governments to easily break into individuals’ phones and PCs, as well as powerful electronic eavesdropping devices that can be used to record all active Internet communications across the Wallstreet Journal. Those papers, more than 200 pages from 36 different organizations, were obtained by people who attended the secret security conference held last month.

Many of these technologies presented at the conference are related to monitoring large amounts of information. A company has selected tens of thousands of synchronous calls from landline and mobile networks or intercepted them en masse. The other describes how she helped the leading Chinese cellular operator monitor the Internet content and apps on the country’s cell phones in real time.

The annual retail market for surveillance tools has expanded from almost nothing in 2001 to a total of $ 35 billion this year, the Journal reported, citing information from TeleStrategies, the conference operator. Organizations operating in this sector argue that their goods are designed to catch criminals and are only made for sale to government and law enforcement agencies.

Still, some international companies are finding that their recent business activity has given them unwanted attention. Cisco Systems is feeling the nasty aftermath of the lawsuit filed earlier this year that accused the tech company of providing and supporting a huge surveillance system that enabled Chinese authorities to easily track and censor all internet activity of a spiritual group . Cisco officials denied all charges, claiming that Cisco sells the same legal equipment in China that it sells in other countries around the world in compliance with US government regulations and laws.

portable wifi jammer for sale

As you can see, if Cisco sells the same equipment around the world, US citizens may face the same risk as Chinese people. In fact we already are. So protect yourself by using wireless wifi jammer and make sure that nobody is watching you. And of course your comments are welcome here!

Raspberry Pi 4 HDMI is interfering with its own WiFi

Upgrading a popular line of products may sound like a good idea, but adding bigger / better / faster parts to an existing product can lead to unforeseen problems. For example, putting a more powerful motor in an existing vehicle platform seems to work at first until people report that the increased torque is bending the frame. In the Raspberry Pi world it seems that the “updated engine” in the Pi 4 causes the WiFi to stop working under certain circumstances.

Enrico Zini noticed this problem and tried to reproduce exactly what caused the WiFi to fail. After testing various Pi 4 cards, power supplies, operating system versions, and a host of other variables, the cause was isolated on the screen resolution. Apparently the WLAN fails with the setting 2560 × 1440 with HDMI. While you might think that a SoC might not be able to handle high resolution, WiFi, and everything else that tiny computer has to do all at once. However, the root cause seems a little more interesting than a simple problem with system resources.

wireless jamming for sale

Mike Walters checked for a radio frequency problem with a HackRF on a Twitter post on this issue. It turns out that at this screen resolution, the Pi 4 emits RF noise that is exactly in the range of WiFi channel 1. It appears that the Pi 4 is acting as a wifi jammer for itself.

This story is pretty new, so hopefully the Raspberry Pi Foundation is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. For now, however, it might be best to use a slightly lower resolution if you encounter this problem.

Drone jammers to disrupt tactical communication

At the 2019 partner exhibition, the International Armaments and Defense Equipment Fair in Belgrade, Serbia, a new quadcopter drone equipped with a jammer to disrupt tactical communications was shown. June 26, 2019.

At the 2019 partner exhibition, the Military Technical Institute of the Serbian Army, in cooperation with the local company, developed a new quadcopter drone carrier jammer to disrupt tactical communication.

A jammer for jamming tactical communication systems is mounted on a quadcopter drone, which is electrically powered by four electric DC motors and has a maximum flight time of 20 minutes. It has an empty weight of 35 kg and 107 kg with the batteries. It can fly at a maximum altitude of 2,000 m with a maximum range of 6 km.

The jamming system mounted on the quadcopter blocks all communication between the drone and its operator in a frequency range from 30 to 88 MHz, optionally with 512 MHz and an HF power of 50 W.

handheld drone jammer light

The drone jammer represents the drone as a platform for electronic attacks. The jamming transmitter of a drone carrier for disrupting tactical communication is used to block tactical communication by radio devices of all kinds. The range of this jamming transmitter could be increased significantly, i.e. H. The area of ​​interference could be increased many times the distance from the initial ground interference position at which it was started.

Another means of using drone-borne jammers could be the wrong target for ant radiation missiles or a means of deceiving the enemy.

The type and working principle of signal shielding instrument

Recently, frequency jammers have appeared in the automotive and telephone markets. These small devices are used to encode and redirect the frequencies of the waves emitted by an electronic device, either in order not to interfere with certain professions or to serve less available destinations.

The different frequency jammers

There are different types of frequency jammer. More and more theaters and hospitals are using it. Frequency jammers prevent cell phones from receiving waves and receiving and making calls or messages. If this is a means of gaining artist respect for function rooms, it can be vital for hospitals as certain waves distort the results obtained with diagnostic or monitoring tools such as electrocardiograms.

wifi signal blocker GPS

Some motorists also equip their vehicles with frequency jammers so that they are not detected by the police or gendarmerie if the speed limit is exceeded. This is prohibited by law and, if verified, could result in law enforcement and a hefty fine. Frequency jammers are also popular with car thieves, who thus interfere with the frequency of your remote shutdown. They think you have closed your doors and you don’t. The thief does not have to get into the vehicle until you have turned your back.

How do frequency jammers work?

A frequency jammer is not a device that takes up a lot of space because it fits in your hand. However, it is a technological tool. It’s inexpensive but not commercially available. The internet and the black market are the main suppliers of frequency jammers.

These pick up waves with an antenna and encrypt them, i.e. they make them illegible. Some frequency jammers have a long range, but the basic models don’t exceed 40 meters.