Wireless Jamming – CompTIA Security+ SY0-501 – 1.2

A wireless network is especially susceptible to wireless jamming. In this video, you’ll learn about wireless jamming techniques and how to stop a wireless jamming attack.

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– There’s nothing really good that comes from wireless jamming. This is jamming the radio frequencies of a communication, most commonly for a wireless network. At its most basic level, this is a denial of service. You are trying to use a network that is no longer available, so you don’t have access to any of those services. The goal with radio frequency jamming is to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiving device.

Because there’s so much jam signal, the device isn’t able to discern the good signal. And therefore, you aren’t able to communicate at all over the network. Sometimes this jamming is not intentional at all. It might be a microwave oven that has been turned on. It might be a fluorescent light, or it may be some other device that is sending traffic out over the same frequencies as your wireless network.

But sometimes jamming is absolutely intentional, where somebody is trying to prevent anybody on that wireless network from being able to work. There are many different kinds of wireless jamming. One might be a constant amount of jamming that is just sending random bits of information. Or it might be a constant amount of jamming [? by ?] the traffic that’s going through [? our ?] legitimate frames. You might also see data being sent at random times. So occasionally, the network may be working normally, and then at other times, not working well at all. And then there is reactive jamming. Maybe the network is working fine until something or someone tries to communicate. And at that point, the network is brought to its knees.

To be able to have a successful jamming of a wireless network, you need to overwhelm the good signal. And the best way to do that is to be somewhere close. So if you can find that source of the jam, then you might be able to remove it from the area and put the network back into a working condition. If you’re trying to find the device that’s sending this jam signal, it may be time to go foxhunting. That’s a term that’s used by wireless professionals to try to hunt down where this unknown signal is coming from.

But you’re going to need the right equipment. At a most basic level, you’ll need a directional antenna, so that you can move around and find where the strongest part of that signal’s coming from. And then you will probably also need something that can attenuate that signal and make it quieter. That helps a lot when you’re getting closer to the wireless signal, so that you can attenuate it and then get a better bearing on where it may be coming from. Regardless of the technique you use, you’re going to need to find that signal, remove it, so that your network can get back up and running.