How can you tell if your alarm company's...

[Neil Johnson]

On Saturday 09 August 2003 07:29 pm, Tim May wrote:
> 
> Cellphones are cheap enough, and monthly charges are small enough when
> N machines share the same monthly account charge (Dad, Mom, Johnnie,
> Suzy, and Alarm). I would be surprised if today's alarm companies
> already aren't making good use of cellphones.

The building where I work has a cellular interface to it's alarm system (Small 
white box with a 800MHz Antenna sticking out of it next to the central alarm 
panel). I think the name on the box is something like "CellSentry". It's fed 
off the batteries for the alarm system so cutting off power won't shut it off 
either.

I have always wondered how the arm/disarm keypad works in most alarm systems.

I would hope it would send a reasonably secure code to the controller to 
disable the alarm system, but I fear that it just a nothing more than a fancy 
remote relay and can be easily bypassed.

They recently added security camers to our system. Instead of using video tape 
they installed a box that records 30 second snap shots continuoulsy to it's 
hard drive.

Security people can access the system over the network (with a dedicated 
application, no idea how secure it is) and examine the captured images.

-- 
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.