A Security Reminder

[Jeff]

A security reminder to myself and my friends here on the forum. Do you have a home network with WIFI? If so, first make sure it is secured, but second, and something I neglected to do, make sure you periodically change your pass key.

Last night the next door neighbor called after midnight. There was a vehicle pulled off in the edge of his yard just short of our driveway. He went out to investigate and the female driver fed him a line that he didn't feel was quite legit, so he called us. I went out and walked right up to the vehicle. Turns out is was a past girlfriend of my son's and a male in the passenger side, who had an open laptop. I demanded to know what they were up to and she gave me this feeble story about trying to get a hold of my son. I read them the riot act and told them to get out of here before I or the neighbor called the cops. I came in and checked, and found that they had been connected to our network leeching off our internet. Our connection is protected with a very good passkey, but it did no good, because we had not changed it in quite some time, and this individual was given the key.

I'm still considering this morning whether to call the law. I don't know what they were really up to by coming here and trying to connect to us, when you can go almost anywhere and find free wi-fi. What they were doing is considered hacking in Michigan and violates Section 752.795 of the Michigan laws on hacking. http://legislature.mi.gov/doc.aspx?mcl-752-795 A possible felony.

[Leigh Family Farm]

Contact your service provider and request a list of websites accessed by your IP. Hopefully, they only accessed simple interent sites and not Tor-Net sites. I would also let the police know what happened and ask their opinion on what to do. It might be illegal to steal internet but will the police actually open a case against the ex-GF.

[Warbird]

As I noted elsewhere, you will want to check whatever local logs you may have from your home router.  And do not assume they were just leeching off your connection.  Depending upon competency levels, they could've been sniffing your LAN traffic for personal info, browsing to very illegal things, or using your connection to do other Bad Things.

Don't want to make you paranoid but if'n I were you, I'd file the report with the police just so that there is a public record that on that day, at about that time, someone else was using your connection.  Because she had been given the password, you probably have no legal recourse.  I recommend this step solely as a 'CYA' measure because you don't know exactly what it is they were doing.

If the police won't even speak with you, then check into whether filing a report here would be appropriate.  Again, just to get something officially on record.

Drop me an email if you need further assistance.

[thecfarm]

I wonder if they was doing it right along and this was the first time you saw them.

[Jeff]

I know the parties involved, and their capabilities beyond using the connection to download music or movies from somewhere would be pretty suspect. Actually, the brain power is such that they are lucky to find their way here on any given night. The only reason they could probably even still connect, was Jeremy used the computer almost two years ago, and had the password saved and it set to connect automatically when in range. I have little doubt that this was not the first time as mentioned. I guarantee it will be the last.

[lowpolyjoe]

Scary stuff.  I hope it works out ok for you Jeff.

As mentioned - who knows what potentially illegal stuff they might have accessed from your network, so a police report might be the safe way to go.

Depending on your wireless router config, you might have detailed logs of your network's web requests.  I remember seeing something like that when i was fiddling with my router setup recently.  I forget it if logged requests by local IP or MAC address.  If it's linked to IP , you might still be able to see what IP they had in the DHCP client table or whatever it's called (also on the router).

Good Luck

[Roxie]

Funny thing I've noticed on my road to being an old head...people that are idiots and crooks can be remarkably clever in order to get something they want.  Especially if that something is illegal.  File an incident report with the police. 

[ronwood]

Jeff,

Depending on your access point,  you can also set access rules that work of the MAC address to furthur enhance security.

For my home network I use PFsense software on a server that acts as firewall and url filtering. All activity is logged.

Ron

Ron