Skip to content
Security Intelligence 3 min read

The Anti-Jam Problem: Why Wireless Security Isn't As Secure As You Think

How professional burglary crews defeat wireless alarm systems — and what anti-jam technology does about it.

In 2025, Spanish police reported a 34% increase in high-value residential burglaries along the Costa del Sol. In the majority of cases, the properties had alarm systems. In many cases, those systems were disabled before the break-in began.

The weapon: a €200 radio jammer from the internet.

How jamming works

Most wireless security devices communicate on one of two frequencies: 433MHz or 868MHz. A jammer broadcasts noise on these frequencies, overwhelming the legitimate signals. Door sensors can’t report to the panel. Motion detectors can’t trigger alerts. The alarm system goes blind.

This isn’t theoretical. Professional burglary crews carry jammers as standard equipment. The devices are small, battery-powered, and effective at ranges of 20-50 meters.

Why most systems are vulnerable

Traditional alarm systems have a single communication path. When that path is jammed, the system fails silently. The alarm panel may not even know it’s being jammed — it simply stops receiving signals from its sensors.

Some modern systems detect jamming by monitoring for unexpected signal loss. But detection without response is just a notification. If the jammer blocks the notification too, the system has failed completely.

Foxworth’s multi-band approach

Foxworth doesn’t rely on a single communication band. The system uses four independent communication paths:

  1. 2.4 GHz — standard WiFi band for high-bandwidth camera feeds
  2. 868 MHz — sub-GHz band for sensor communication (longer range, lower bandwidth)
  3. UWB (Ultra-Wideband) — short-range, extremely difficult to jam due to wide frequency spread
  4. Powerline — wired communication through existing electrical wiring (impossible to jam wirelessly)

Jamming one frequency triggers automatic failover to alternatives. Jamming two frequencies is exponentially harder. Jamming all four — including the wired powerline path — is effectively impossible without physical access to the property’s electrical system.

Jamming as a trigger

Here’s the key insight: jamming is itself an intrusion signal.

If Foxworth detects that one or more communication bands are being jammed, it doesn’t just failover — it escalates. Jamming detection triggers an immediate threat assessment. Combined with any camera detection (which operates on the wired network and is unjammable), this creates a rapid escalation to drone deployment.

A jammer intended to disable the security system instead triggers the most aggressive response the system has.

The arms race

Security is always an arms race. Professional criminals adapt to new defenses. But the cost of defeating Foxworth’s multi-band, multi-path architecture is orders of magnitude higher than defeating a single-frequency alarm system.

A €200 jammer defeats most alarm systems. Defeating Foxworth requires specialized equipment worth tens of thousands, detailed knowledge of the system’s architecture, and the ability to jam four independent frequency bands simultaneously — all while being recorded by wired cameras.

The economics of burglary don’t support that level of investment. And that’s the point.

Want multi-band anti-jam security for your property? Request a consultation.