Internet of Things (IoT) products and the mobbers’ Internet of Malicious Things (IoMT, to coin a phrase and its acronym) are strong reminders that there are sensors for every flow, whether a flow of current, gas or water. I’ve raised the possibility that property mobbers use WiFi and other signal extenders to envelop victims in their “webs”, using signal boosting to overwhelm or “brute force” IoT management applications to gain control of victim devices and ultimately, the victim environment.
I’ve considered whether, in a world of malicious things, a mobbing victim might embrace IoT applications as a means of competing with the mobbers for her domain. But using IoT to fight off attacks mounted on wireless signal seems a defense that would likely fail. It my case, it wouldn’t work at all. All along, I have tried to mitigate the impact of mobbing by avoiding WiFi and IoT. It hasn’t been much of a sacrifice; the gadgetry and growing deemphasis of process and hands-on interaction with the physical world is uninteresting to me. There are also nondigital sensors that can be applied to systems, water flow sensors among them. And those might be more difficult for a signal hacker to crack.
Why water flow sensors? When your water is shut off and you hear jets of water being propelled into your house through some channel, there are a few possibilities. With mobbers who leverage backgrounds in virtual reality or working with the apparatus of sound, there’s always the possibility that that backyard WiFi access point less than 10 feet from your bedroom windows supports, for example, some amped-up backyard Bluetooth-enabled torchlights at the fence line. Simulating sounds to disturb and unsettle is typical for mobbers whose criminal trade relies on the heavy use of sound diversion (Radiohead: Cell phones are radios (part 3)).I’ve called it “the mobbers’ Foley” after the technique that was pioneered in the Golden Age of Radio. But when the sound of rushing water is the precursor to mobbing prattle that subsides with the quieting of the flow, it’s pretty clear that the mobbers are using the current–flow–and not just a well-placed speaker to get the verbal abuse in to you. Likewise, when the propulsion of water or some aerosolized matter wakes you to a black cloud of charged matter and dirt, the soundscape isn’t coming to you from a virtual reality. Especially not when one of the mobbers involved in the pre-dawn attack taunts you, “That’s what you get for sleeping on the floor!”
Putting a mattress on a hardwood floor is good for avoiding your mobbing neighbors’ misdirected motion detectors or the brunt of the audible harassment that falls on window panes in the dead of night. It’s not so good when the hardwood floor is over a crawl space containing a sump pump pit that the mobbers seem to be able to access from some underground pipe flow. In this case, the mobbing abuse is accompanied by the physical sensation of the impact of water or air being shot into your environment.
When you’ve already removed most of the risk of abandoned pipe and pipe that runs too close to the neighbors’ lots, the malicious use of compressors to shoot air or water backward into a plumbing system makes more and more sense, especially when you are experiencing pipe failures. This likelihood increases with the observation of underground digging and work on the sewer laterals.
This short article will talk about the kinds of sensors that might be used to detect the malicious and illegal use of your plumbing to evict.
