Crime has been increasing in my area since the state legislators changed the laws to lessen the penalties of various crimes. Home burglaries have been increasing. As a result, the alarm business is booming as more people have both hardwired and wireless burglar alarms installed.
Good alarm systems can prevent your home from being burglarized and provide you with a lot of security. But it needs to be a monitored system so that the police are called automatically by your service provider. In addition, it should have the windows covered by either switches or motion detectors and preferably by both.
I have been talking to a couple of security people who have been looking at many of the new wireless burglar alarms. They have provided me with information on how easy it is to hack these alarms. Now I have decided to warn you about this problem, but I am not going to share the method that is being used. It can be done easily with products that are currently on the market and are inexpensive. It is becoming common knowledge amongst many of the burglars.
This applies to all but the most expensive of the wireless alarms. It also includes all of the inexpensive wireless driveway alarms sold by companies like Harbor Freight. This is only one of the down sides to wireless alarms. The second is that they require you to replace the batteries on a regular schedule. It has been my experience and the experience of my friends that a large number of people fail to replace the batteries on schedule and therefore their alarms are not working.
Hard wire alarms are harder to install, but once they are in take no maintenance. They are the most reliable and much harder to hack. The same problems also apply to wireless surveillance cameras. Beware of the simple wireless burglar alarms that are becoming more popular. I suspect that with time some of these problems may be solved but the time is not now.
Howard
