In Indonesia, terrorists were caught bombing Wi-Fi enabled backup triggers. The police claimed this week.
The explosives were discovered in a raid earlier this month and included a switch mechanism that allowed them to be detonated using a signal sent over Wi-Fi when the main trigger uses a SIM card and on the detonation of a cell phone message waiting. was blocked by radio frequency jammers.
“He can put [the bombs] in some backpacks with it and later he would detonate them, for example, only 1 km away,” said Brigadier General Dedi Prasetyo at a press conference according to The Strait Times. Yes, we know that Wi-Fi usually doesn’t have a range of 1 km. We will come back to that shortly.
Indonesia is on high alert before the results of its presidential election are announced next week. The elections closed in April and in recent days Prabowo Subianto, the main opponent of the current presidency, has held rallies asking the election observer to investigate allegations of fraud.
President-in-Office Joko Widodo is expected to be re-elected when the results are released on May 22nd, and in advance the cops have encountered suspected terrorists: there are fears that extremists will trigger explosives in street protests because of the poll results.
You JAD, brother?
In such an attack on the island of Java, members of the Islamic State-affiliated group JAD (Jamaah Ansharut Daulah) were tied up and the bomb found significant amounts of the same explosive used by the Islamic State in bombs in Paris , Brussels and Sri Lanka.
According to the police, one of the detainees is a professional bomb maker who worked on the Wi-Fi trigger mechanism. It is not uncommon for bombs to use Wi-Fi signals – there have been several cases in the Middle East – but it is believed to be the first outside the region.
Further details of the bombs were released by Dedi in Jakarta on Thursday. While the Indonesian police are now routinely using signal jammers at large public gatherings, in recent years, thanks to a flood of bombs, they have only interfered with mobile phone communications and have not affected radio frequencies.
Even if Wi-Fi does not transmit some cell phone signals, the range, according to the police, can be increased to one kilometer by carefully designing routers and amplifiers. While this may be news for people dealing with dead spots in their own homes, it is alarming for security forces trying to secure large areas full of people.
Dedi also complained that it is more difficult to interfere with WLAN signals than mobile communications, which makes these bombs activated with WLAN highly undesirable, although the speaker did not go into detail about them.
Indonesian police officers may not have the equipment to effectively overflow all different wireless network channels with noise enough to disrupt communication. Standard WLAN uses a healthy number of frequency bands, e.g. B. 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 3.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz, 5 GHz, 5.9 GHz and 60 GHz.
The police may turn off the telephone poles to block the transmission of messages, and this is not possible with fake Wi-Fi base stations and repeaters. The expanded Wi-Fi signals may be highly directional or use non-standard radio frequencies, thereby bypassing the Southeast Asian nation’s jammers.
Experienced Reg readers are invited to join in. If bombs activated by WLAN become a regular threat, we can imagine that people will step up their efforts to develop and use more effective wifi jammer.