My neighbour the thief!

I noticed my internet connection was really slow even though I have a super fast service. Anyway, I done a scan using who is on my wifi and there was an unknown computer on my network. The ip is very similar to mine and my router is weak, so I know he/she is close, in my apartment block to be exact and there are only four apartments here. So my question is, how do I easily remove them permanently? I have password protected wap2, so they must have cracking software and I don't want it to happen again. I would also like to know who they are so I can shame them in public lol.

Thank you in advance!

James

you can restrict computers by IP or MAC address in your router settings
to access your wifi

allow only your MAC address and forbid all the others, problem solved

Good advice, thank you

MAC filtering would be a good idea, unless you have various devices.
I have done it in the past, but then it was a pain in the ass because my wifi printer didn't work, if a friend come along it couldn't use the wifi, etc.

So my solution was to hide the SSID, so if anyone searches, they won't find it, and use a secure password.

Use this software : Netcut http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Tools/Network-Monitoring/netcut.shtml

MACs can be easily spoofed. Hiding SSID isn't really effective either. Ever heard about Backtrack? Google it! hehehe...

What you need to to is secure your connection with WPA2 and a good RANDOM password! No one can crack this ever! NEVER use WEP encryption, this can be cracked within a matter of minutes.

foshizzle said:

MACs can be easily spoofed. Hiding SSID isn't really effective either. Ever heard about Backtrack? Google it! hehehe...

What you need to to is secure your connection with WPA2 and a good RANDOM password! No one can crack this ever! NEVER use WEP encryption, this can be cracked within a matter of minutes.

Click to expand...

Oh cmon man, we're talking about a neighbor who probably just guessed his password, not a word series hacker.
Just hide your SSID and change your password. If he's able to get in, he's probably very skilled and there's few you can do to prevent him from getting in.

foshizzle said:

MACs can be easily spoofed. Hiding SSID isn't really effective either. Ever heard about Backtrack? Google it! hehehe...

What you need to to is secure your connection with WPA2 and a good RANDOM password! No one can crack this ever! NEVER use WEP encryption, this can be cracked within a matter of minutes.

Click to expand...

foshizzle said:

MACs can be easily spoofed. Hiding SSID isn't really effective either. Ever heard about Backtrack? Google it! hehehe... Whatyou need to to is secure your connection with WPA2 and a good RANDOM password! No one can crack this ever! NEVER use WEP encryption, this can be cracked within a matter of minutes.

Click to expand...

MACs can be spoofed, but spoof to what? you only allow your MAC address to access the wifi, how the hell the neighbor will guess the MAC w/o having access to the network/router? and OP already said he protected his network with WPA2 and it's cracked
if restricting by MAC address is not enough, his neighbor is a big time hacker, so he can do anything he wants

or if OP has a static IP, he can restrict by IP as well

From Todays Telegraph.

How do I secure my internet?








By Rick Maybury

8:00AM BST 15 Apr 2012




I live in a block of flats and connect to the web using a wireless connection. My router is security enabled but can someone in another flat utilise my signal via their laptop? If so, is this legal? The reason for asking is that for some time now when I am on the web, I get a mystery pop-up message that states ?I am now connected?.


That pop-up is almost certainly nothing to worry about. It usually means the connection is being interrupted, possibly due to poor signal strength, congestion or interference from other wireless networks in the vicinity. This forces your router to channel hop, resulting in a brief loss of connection. The security systems used on home wireless systems can be hacked but it?s not an easy matter and requires a fair amount of technical expertise and determination. Provided you are using the highest level of encryption (usually WPA2), with a long passphrase of 25 or more characters, you should be reasonably safe.

Hacking into a computer network is illegal (Computer Misuse and Communications Acts of 1990 and 2003). One easy way to check if it is happening to you is to observe your router?s activity lights when your PC is switched off. An occasional blink is normal but if it is flashing constantly then you should be suspicious. You may be able to identify the intruder with a small freeware utility called http://goo.gl/BHg5A, which shows the IP address, MAC address and the name of the computers and devices connecting to your router.

Incidentally, you can stop wireless hackers in their tracks using a feature on most routers called the DCHP Client List. This lets you specify the unique MAC address of the PCs and other devices that you want to allow to access your network and Internet connection. You should find details of how to use it in your router?s manual or on-line help.

Click to expand...

I'm not convinced it's a neighbor stealing. A new problem I've discovered on a business network I manage is that some mobile phone apps are buggy as hell, and will run network usage off the charts. People come in with their mobile devices in their purse, and at about lunchtime the work computers start falling off the wireless network while desktops connected via LAN have no issue. We are considering changing the PW and restricting access to the wireless network to only work computers. So the first thing I would do is rule in/rule out any mobile devices.

The second thing to consider is if the PW was hacked, how it happened. WPA2 can be hacked, but it takes time and a good amount of computer power and some skill. If they have the sophistication to crack encrypted WPA2 packets, they can afford their own internet. Are you certain wireless encryption is enabled. I"ve done on-site calls where someone in the household turned off encryption because they couldn't remember/weren't suppsed to have the PW, and no one knew it was unsecured.

Some routers will output both a secure and unsecured wireless signal, and unless you manually turn of the unsecured signal you are providing free wireless to the whole neighborhood.

People that dabble in blackhat arts frequently install experimental, special-purpose software downloaded from suspicious and highly dangerous places like uh.... well yeah, and so then their "free proxy" software decides to start offering free proxy service to all manner of evil spammers and ne'er-do-wells. Another thing to consider is that the existence of an outside party is what is spoofed, and in fact it's your own machine that is performing illicit operations online.

Maybe YOU are "Anonymous", lol. That's one way to remain hidden, is to make someone else do the dirty work.

Finally, I'd want to know PW length and whether or not it was guessable. Was it "password" or "poopoo12"? Dictionary attacks are much faster than brute force, and are a more likely explanation.
Change your current PW to something else, and see if it throws the unknown entity off the network. Not sure what the longest & most complex WPA2 password is, but I'd bet the time to crack it is in terms of years, so changing it to a hardened PW may be the only thing you need to do. But malware is still a possibility.

Duplicate post.

Since you are running WPA2 you should be fairly safe. Just change the key to something completely random and you should be safe for quite some time. To crack any random wpa2 key within a reasonable amount of itme your intruder would probably be using dual GPU's for cracking, and unless you have a true geek in the house, that is probably not what's happening.

You absolutely sure it is an intruder btw? Could be your phone, could be a vmware guest.

Is WPA really that vulnerable these days then?
If it is or the password was guessed then wouldnt this be the only time you could legally do arp poisoning on your own network it and sniff his logins? If its still quite technical then theres a chance hes doing this to you.

Get a program called WIRESHARK and install it on a computer or laptop and directly connect it to your router. Wireshark is a packet sniffer and will capture all the traffic going in/out of your router and create a logfile of it(a HUGE logfile if u run it a long time). Now, go through the logs of all your neighbor's traffic and get information you might find useful and fuck him up.

You can either do that or a) change your Pa33w0rd7z523ll b) enable MAC filtering c) disable WPA and use only WPA2. You could change your SSID and make it hidden but that isn't really security. If he/she still manages to leech off of your connection, you can always just walk over to his place with a baseball bat and give him a wood shampoo.

What's your router? If it's a NetGear, make sure your "public network" is disabled. Some other mfgs ship their wifi routers with public access enabled by default so make sure that's disabled.

Use wpa2 with a crazy complicated password. Works like a charm for me. Like stated before, if someone can figure out how to crack a wpa2 password, they probably have enough skills to make money and buy their own internet.

MAC can be sniffed and spoofed.

WEP is shit - never use it.

WPA/WPA2 can only be cracked if you are using pre-shared keys with it. Do not use those.

Change the password to your router's web admin interface.

Just change the encryption to WEP2 (I think)

Change the password

Change and hide SSID

and MAC address filter it on top of that.

Should stop 99% of thieves

Firstly, thank you all for your input and time. Some very good answers there. The chances of any of my neighbours being top class hackers is slim and if they was, they would indeed be able to afford their own internet. Now I can see that another ip address is using my router. It isn't a mobile device in my own home. I checked that out which leads me to the conclusion that I may have maleware installed on my computer. Thing is though if that was the case, why does it say that another ip is riding my internet, an ip that is very similar to my own (all the digits are the same apart from the last 3) I also done a full scan with malewarebytes and it says I'm clean.

Change your networks name to "Hard-drive-Nuke-botnet-virus"
That should keep them away.

Connect your computer via lan line and disable the router or wifi feature on your modem. Do another scan, if everything looks fine then you know that your computer itself is O.K i.e malware, spyware etc. If you only notice issues when you have wifi running then you need to figure out a way (or implement the ideas here) to secure your connection.