Need help with protecting my wifi from a neighbor

[Sky]

check any Apple devices on your network. i see iphones, apple tv, macs, etc all using randomized mac addresses by default and not providing their network names. until i disabled the feature on the clients, i though some neighbor was connected to my wifi too.

Man that's the truth! Apple's default randomized MAC addresses can drive both you and your users nuts, especially if you need to isolate one or more of those devices. Alright, who put a new device on without telling me??!!

(Yes, I realize this thread is old and stale thread, but so am I. )

 

[Hudiniyo]

First of all, I want to thank you all for taking the time and replying to my post!

I’m sorry for the delayed response, I thought that the post was not approved for some reason, so after a few days from posting it, I stopped checking the forum..

After doing some more research, and although it is quite embarrassing, I must admit that @ugandy, @Paliv and @Sky were right!!

I discovered that at least in two instances the “mysterious hacker” was actually the android TV box provided by my ISP. What confused me, was i) it did not use the MAC address printed on the TV box; and ii) it was turned off (but still plugged into a wall outlet) and I’m 99% confident that I did not enter my new wifi password into the device’s interface (however, during one of the “instances” it was probably connected to the router via LAN).

After learning the above, recently I had a similar experience with Apple watch – it turns out that it connects to the internet through the Iphone device it has been paired with, but uses some random MAC address (not iPhone’s one and not the one that is printed on the watch’s box, which can also be viewed in settings) and appears with no name on the “clients” list in my router. I'm still curious to know how it bypasses the MAC filtering..

By the way, interestingly enough, when I contacted my ISP to make a complaint (just for the record), the (senior) technical support representative I spoke with, was not surprised at all, he said that usually a “hacker” just captures some wifi traffic of the target (mostly just the nearest one) and does all the heavy lifting offline, so I should not be shocked by the fact that a 40 characters long password was cracked, because the current protocols have some weaknesses (I guess he meant WEP/WPA2).


Although there are still some open questions as to what happened and how exactly the TV box could connect (and stay connected) to the router, I tend to believe that I was not a target of a mysterious neighbor hacker


Thank you all again for your replies! I’ve learned a lot!

 

[Hudiniyo]

Welcome to the forums @Hudiniyo.

I too am skeptical of your router's WiFi getting hacked (over the air). Please tell us how you know you're hacked.

Have you previously shared your WiFi password with this neighbor in the past? He may have one of your internal devices infected and can get in no matter what password you come up with.

If you really are hacked. First, check externally that your internet connection to the world isn't tappable.

Second, disconnect all devices connected to the network. Do not reconnect them until you've either thoroughly scanned them or have performed a clean OS install on each. Even having done this, do not reconnect them until all steps are completed here.

Third, disconnect the router's WAN port/connection and fully reset and configure your router offline, without using any saved backup config files, any USB drives (that you haven't scanned for virii), and without connecting to your ISP until your router is as fully configured, and secured, as possible.

The computing power to 'hack' a truly random (you're not using common phrases, are you?) 40-character WiFi password is not in reach of any home user today (even if they're using quantum computing hardware that can fit inside a room of a normal home).

Thank you for your detailed response!