When the alarm does not beep but stays silent: jamming detection alongside the existing system
A jammer does not break into an alarm system. It takes away its voice. The control panel works and the detectors detect, but the signal does not get out. And from the monitoring centre’s point of view, silence looks exactly like calm.
On October 7, 2026, SS&Si Dealer Network announced that it will distribute the AJV4 jamming detector made by Bordeaux-based Telecom Design in North America. The design is interesting because it does not replace the control panel: it places an independent device running on its own battery power alongside it, whose only job is to notice when someone silences the system and to report it even without the panel.
What makes no sound: the problem of silence
The signal paths of alarm systems are usually supervised, and a loss is sooner or later noticed. But “sooner or later” depends on the polling interval and the settings. And a jammer exploits exactly the gap in which the system does not yet know it has been silenced. So the question is not whether the system notices the loss, but how long after the start of the attack, and whether it also sees the cause.
According to SS&Si’s source, criminals increasingly use jammers to disrupt wireless communications and to disable security systems. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported in June 2025 that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had seized roughly 830 per cent more jammers since 2021. A percentage can be large from a small base, but the direction is clear: the devices are cheap, easy to obtain and simple to operate.
More paths, one weak point
A modern alarm signals over several paths: radio, mobile network, IP. According to Jake Voll, CEO of SS&Si, this is not enough if an attacker can jam all of them at once. Redundancy ends where the common cause begins. If both the radio and the mobile path are vulnerable in the same frequency range, we cannot speak of redundancy.
The AJV4’s answer is therefore not another communication channel to the control panel but the use of an independent observer. It does not strengthen the communication; it detects the attack.
What can the AJV4 do – according to the manufacturer?
- Installation without intervention. It needs no data or power cable and can be wall-mounted in minutes. It does not connect to the control panel and does not modify it, so it can be placed alongside an existing system.
- Spectrum analysis with machine learning. According to the announcement, the model was trained on more than 10 years of field data. It analyses the cellular, the 915 MHz alarm-band, the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth ranges. It distinguishes a jammer attacking a targeted frequency from a wideband noise jammer, and chooses a bypass route accordingly.
- Getting out through the noise. It uses several network connections and, according to the manufacturer, signals within 30 seconds, through cloud-to-cloud APIs or standard monitoring-centre interfaces.
Three questions before anyone installs it
- What can the existing control panel already do? The EN 50131 series of standards (MSZ EN 50131 in Hungary) for wireless alarm components also deals with the detection of radio jamming. Before installing a new device, it has to be clarified what the system can already do and which security grade it has to meet.
- Who receives the signal, and what do they do with it? A jamming alarm is a new type of event. It needs a procedure: who is notified, what has to be done, and how an attack is told apart from an industrial source of interference.
- Is it the same frequency band in Europe? The article mentions the 915 MHz band, which is a North American peculiarity. In Europe, wireless alarms typically work at 868 MHz. The North American announcement therefore cannot be transferred automatically to installations in Hungary; the European version and its compliance have to be examined separately.
Conclusion
What decides against jamming is not how many communication paths we have, but whether we notice when all of them go silent at once. The AJV4 is one possible answer to this, but the manufacturer’s claims have to be measured before the system goes live. The principle, though, is independent of the product: an alarm system has to report its own silencing as well. This also makes wireless communication a field of the convergence of cyber and physical security.
Sources: SecurityInfoWatch: SS&Si to Distribute Telecom Design’s AJV4 Jamming Alarm in North America (October 8, 2026); SS&Si Dealer Network
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