Sniping the security

The project:
How to remotely disable security cameras nondestructively from quite a distance…

Oh God oh God oh why:
It’s no secret. A lot of my inspiration comes from movies and for quite some time I have become more and more annoyed by Hollywoods sometimes rather silly solutions for an agent to shut down security cameras in order to remain undetected: E.g. blowing up the nearby power-plant or rigging up gadgets in sewers, where they can be detected by renovation workers and the sorts. If you blow something up or otherwise break it, your counterpart will immediately know it is sabotage and rule out a simple technical malfunction.

Another thing that got me to write this article is the abundant usage of surveillance cameras everywhere which makes me want to burst the bubble about security of surveillance cameras by exposing their weakness. Switching point of view will also often lead to improvement…


The basics:
The laser sniper project can basically be split in to three minor projects: The laser and scope with mount, The remote and The switch

Part one: The laser and scope with mount

For the actual disabling of the camera, I decided to use a standard laser for simply blinding the camera. The simplicity of this construction makes me wanna weep (I think I read somewhere that the best spy gadgets are the simplest). In theory I’ll shoot it through a window using a suction camera mount as base, which also makes my contraption quite small and easy to put up almost everywhere.
Mount an ordinary sports rifle scope with the laser mounted directly on the scope and then calibrate the two so that the laser dot hits the center of the crosshair.


Part two: The remote

In the search for a transmitter/receiver solution that had both range and some sort of signal encoding (so others wouldn’t accidently trigger my laser) it hit me: cellphones… they both have potential worldwide coverage, are hardcore encrypted and since they are sold by the billions, they are quite affordable - especially second hand cellphones. So I dug out my Nokia 6280 from my “Cellphone with SLR-lens” project.

I cracked it open once again…


Flipped the top over, removed a warranty sticker and opened up, removed the built-in speaker and solded a sound output cable to speaker connectors.


The next step is done so that the relay on the switch doesn’t sound like Fred Astaire on speed when the phone receives an SMS…
Set up the phone to play a sound only once when receiving an SMS


I found a single click sound off the internet, uploaded it to the phone and set the phone to use it when receiving an SMS…

Part three: The switch

What I then needed was a way for the cellphone to communicate with the laser. Since I’m no wizz at making circuits from scratch, I started scavenging the internet for a building kit that would do the job for me and found a Sound switch from Smartkit. This little gizmo reacts to sounds like claps and flips a switch

I found a small acryllic case and built in the electronics, added a grafite core to filter out electrical noise and two resistors (together 125KΩ) to weaken the signal a bit. Finally, I gave it an on/off switch.


Putting the pieces together:

Finally we just need to set up the laser on target, plug it into the switch, plug in the cellphone and you’re all set.


Materials and price tag::

Hunting scope - 25$
BB gun Laser - 20$
Mountings - 15$
Cellphone - Anywhere form 50$ and up depending on the model and age
Switch circuit - 25$
Box - 3$
Wires, plugs, grafitecore, resistors and other - 15$


Putting it to real use:
Let’s just pretend for a moment that we were actually going to use this setup to enter a building without being seen…
Usually the guys that put up the cameras are clever enough to not just put one camera up to guard an entrance. But they put up several for two reasons; Mainly to get more than one angle on the perps trying to get in, and to make the cameras cover each other so the perps can’t just yank out the power-plug on the cameras…
To get in we’ll need a laser for every camera… (se the drawings below) and a cable-splitter for multiple lasers connected to one switch and cellphone.


And if we’re going to be smart about this… which I’d like to think… then maybe we should take out all the cameras covering the perimeter of the building to make it look like a system failure rather than us trying to get in unseen… just a thought.

Troubled thoughts during the projeckt:
I had some serious thoughts about how to trigger the laser on and off. First, I thought I’d use an old wrist watch as a timer, but ended up discarding that idea… It just didn’t feel right and if the “agent” had to shut down several security cameras, he would not only have to synchronize all the watches and set them up to turn the lasers on at the exact right time at once, but also turn them off after the job. My second idea was to remotely trigger the laser by radio or walkie-talkie. This would give the “agent” the possibility of e.g. pressing the call button on the walkie which would send out a beep to activate the lasers needed.
The problem with this solution is that by using a standard walkie, everybody else could activate the lasers accidently if they where using the same channel (keep in mind that almost all baby-alarms use the standard walkie-talkie frequency). So unless I were to use pro walkie with encryption, I’d have to modify my plans a bit.
In the search for a transmitter/receiver solution that both had range and some sort of signal coding, it hit me: cellphones. But how well will this actually work? Well, after I build this, I had to try it out on an old security camera… Then I had some friends sending it a test-SMS and finally I had someone I knew across the Atlantic do it as well… No problem there, either. It worked like a charm.

The fine print at the bottom…
In case you’ve missed the huge warning sign I’ve put up or choose to disregard it and are thinking about using the knowledge you’ve just gained to be messing with something you shouldn’t… Think about this: Maybe I left some minor, but crucial details out so assholes won’t be messing with something they shouldn’t be messing with… without getting their asses busted

So don’t !!!

Tutorial from chaos.com