Terrorists have been caught strapping Wi-Fi-activated backup triggers to bombs in Indonesia, police claimed this week.
The explosives were discovered in a raid earlier this month, and included a switching mechanism that enabled them to be detonated using a signal sent via Wi-Fi if the main trigger, which uses a SIM card and waits for a mobile phone message to detonate, was blocked by radio-frequency jammers.
"With that, he can put [the bombs] in some backpacks, and later he would just detonate them from a distance of 1km, for example," said Brigadier-General Dedi Prasetyo at a press conference, according to The Strait Times.
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Even though Wi-Fi will not travel as far as some cellphone signals, the police said that a careful construction of routers and amplifiers can extend the range as far as one kilometer. Which, while it may be news to people that deal with dead spots in their own house, is alarming to security forces trying to secure large areas full of people.
It might be fun to try infrasound, too.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 22 2019, @06:03AM (1 child)
Yeah, but Indonesia uses WiFi frequencies used nowhere else on earth, so the jammers don't work. From the article:
No idea how you'd jam Indonesia's amazing 900MHz Wifi, or 3.6GHz WiFi, with a 2.4/5GHz jammer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:17AM
I don't see how it should be more difficult to jam those other frequencies. As long as you can send a signal on those frequencies, you also can send noise on them.