2600 Magazine_ The Hacker Quarterly - Digital Edition - Summer 2011 - 2600 Magazine [27]
A quick search on Alibaba.com produced a jammer capable of operating on the 315 MHz frequency at a range of between 50 and 100 meters for roughly $35 USD. I'm sure a more intensive search could produce a cheaper and perhaps more reliable device, but you get the point: what they need to prevent you from locking your car via a remote is easily accessible and not very expensive. It's also not exactly rocket science to operate, either, which probably explains why they're in this line of work, if you want to call it that.
So how do you protect yourself, your friends, and family from this? Exercise common sense. If you don't hear your door locks "move" into the locked position after pressing the corresponding button on the remote, try again. Still nothing? Then manually lock your doors. A jammer isn't going to prevent you from manually locking each door or pressing an "All Lock" button in your car. It's not going to unlock them either once you leave. If your car remote doesn't work, don't panic and don't become paranoid. There's usually a common explanation to the above scenario: a low battery. Your car is already locked at this point; even if someone is trying to jam your remote in the area, you've already thwarted their attempts. Take your remote to the local auto parts store when you get a chance and have them check your battery’s strength. Breathe a sigh of relief when they tell you it's dead and you didn't just almost become the latest victim of a radio jamming gang.
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Air Intercepted Messaging: A Revisit of POCSAG and Radio Privacy Issues
by Malf0rm3dx & Megalos | 2502 words
A couple of times every year, I find myself wading through the boxes of electronic components, parts, wires, and miscellaneous odds and ends that I've accumulated over the years. Usually this is done in an effort to make space for new gadgetry or by the demands of my wife who threatens me with bodily harm should I not get rid of some the electronic "giblets" that threaten to take over the house. I guess this is common tradecraft for those of us with the hacker gene and love for technology.
A recent purging seemed like all the rest, but, while rummaging through the old electronics cables and connectors, something caught my eye. From its facade it looked like just a regular RS-232 connector. Upon closer inspection, I realized that I had stumbled across my old L0pht Heavy Industries data slicer. Oh the memories! My mind quickly ventured back to the old days when pagers were the prevailing technology for communications. I remembered all the fun and adventure that was to be had with a simple radio frequency scanner and a data slicer. As I thought about all the information that could be obtained when using these types of devices, it occurred to me how significantly society has changed from a privacy perspective. I remember these devices being able to intercept and decode sensitive and extremely personal medical information, personal messages to loved ones, alerts and warning messages from devices that were being monitored, even detailed data captured from airplanes as they flew overhead. As I pondered all of the things that were possible with these devices in the late 90s and early 2000s, I wondered, could it still be possible to collect all of the same sensitive information today? Were pager systems still a viable technology and something currently used by corporations and institutions? Did they broadcast personally identifiable and private information to the world in an unencrypted manner? My curiosity had to know the answers to these questions and I found myself dusting off my old radio scanner and collecting up the necessary cables to find out.
A Word About the Technology
For those of us who grew up in the years when personal pagers were considered a new consumer technology and were all the rage, the acronym POCSAG is not an unfamiliar