Chateau Pétrus, Lafite-Rothschild and what you need to know about your alarm system vulnerabilities

A French wine thief has been caught during his second robbery on top Paris restaurants wine cellars.

Our interest in this story was almost lost in the copy but there is a very important bit on information for many people.

"Police found gloves and mobile telephone scramblers used to disable the restaurant's alarm systems."

"mobile telephone scramblers"... these are better known as jammers. Basically a small hand-held device that transmits radio noise on cellular frequencies causing the phones to drop to 'no service'. Why is this important, well an increasing number of our alarm systems are using GSM as a back-up to alert the police of an alarm (indeed a number of them advertise 'GSM protected' on their front panel!).

We have been advising our customers for a long time that this is a very poor method of alarm backup as it can be defeated by a £50 jammer which are freely available, although almost certainly illegal to turn on (info here, here, and here ).

I wonder when the alarm companies will take this seriously and stop just pushing product?

If you are concerned about asset protection be sure to engage a specialist independent audit of your systems and procedures.

more here...