By Byron V. Acohido
The risk of being hacked comes with living in the digital age. But now another form of digital disruption—signal jamming— is rapidly gaining traction and shaping yet another type of risk for consumers and businesses to worry about.
We’ve come to rely on digital signals moving through the Internet cloud and in and out of our computing devices. The problem is: it turns out that jamming digital signals is an easy thing to do.
Just when you thought it was safe
Security and privacy experts are starting to discuss how the disruptions wrought by digital signal jamming can cause harm ranging from the trivial to potentially catastrophic. Clearly, the horse is out of the barn.
The largest fine ever issued by the Federal Communications Commission—$34.9 million—was levied in June 2014 against Chinese online retailer CTS Technology for marketing nearly 300 signal jammers in the United States over more than two years.
Digital jammers are illegal in the United States because they can block 911 and law enforcement communications. Yet the devices remain cheap and easy to acquire on the Internet. People with a range of motivations are buying jammers and putting them to different uses.
Dean Liptak, a high school science teacher in Pasco County, Florida, for instance, earlier this year got fed up with his students disregarding school policy requiring them to turn off their cell phones while class was in session.
So Liptak used a jammer to shut down cell phone usage while he was lecturing. Verizon detected their customers’ phones being jammed in and around the high school and put a stop to Liptak’s use of a jammer as a teaching aid.
Meanwhile, last May a ring of clever car thieves in the United Kingdom used a type of jammer available for less that $50 on the Internet to disrupt shoppers in the act of digitally locking their vehicles at the Manchester Fort Shopping Park.
The thieves … more