Perhaps the most distant of all in most cases, but very common in others. Many users put very simple passwords on their router. Dates of birth, names of their children, even choose to put the name of the Wi-Fi network as a password. Social engineering also plays a fundamental role here.
Perhaps China Email List our neighbor, inexperienced as he is in networks, knows us well. Maybe you know our date of birth or any other information you can use.
We can always be in doubt whether someone can be inside our network. Fortunately, we have different options at our disposal to check if our Wi-Fi is free of intruders or, on the contrary, there might be one.
One of the ways we have to look for intruders in our router is to. Normally we can do this via 192.168.1.1 in the browser and entering the credentials. We should go to the “DHCP Status” section, where you will see a list of all the devices that have received the IP through the router’s DHCP server, another highly recommended option is to go to the ARP table section where all connected devices it will appear, have a fixed private IP or get it from DHCP.
There we will see, depending on the router we have, a section to check which devices are connected to our network. If we see a stranger besides our own, it may be an intruder.
We can achieve something similar programs and applications to see the devices connected to this network. This type of program can look at our computer’s ARP table and force a scan of the entire local area network to see each of the connected devices. We could also see our group’s ARP table by entering the following command into the Windows or Linux console:
A list of all the IP-MAC addresses connected to the network will appear, we need to check one by one which device it is, in order to know if we have an intruder in the wireless network.
Some programs for Windows that we can use are Wireless Network Watcher , and we can even use. WiFi Channel Monitorto see only Wi-Fi connected devices and not wired devices.
When something goes wrong, it’s usually not a good sign. If we find that the Internet connection is slow, that there are network interruptions, it may be because we have intruders, so we can use the previous tools to detect them.
What’s really important is to prevent intruders from entering our network. We are going to give a series of tips to protect our wireless networks so that no one can get in, or at least it is much more difficult than at first, something fundamental to protect not only our bandwidth, but also our communications, because Once the cybercriminal is inside our network, they could spy on everything we do.
It’s important to always have WPA2-AES encryption, and if your router (and your Wi-Fi clients) support it, use WPA3-AES for the latest security protocol. It is important to have strong passwords, by which we mean keys that contain letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers and other special characters. All this randomly and with a length that does not allow you to find it easily, it is recommended to use more than 15 characters in Wi-Fi networks, remember that the minimum number is 8 characters and the maximum is 63 characters, so you have space have a much larger key .
WEP type encryption should always be avoided, even WPA-TKIP, at least WPA2-AES, moreover, the rest of the encryption has been canceled by the Wi-Fi Alliance and only old routers support these protocols, the new ones directly, use always the safest.
It is very important to change the default Wi-Fi password provided with the router to avoid possible attacks on how these passwords are generated. All Wi-Fi keys we use must always be our own, that is, the ones we have indicated and not the ones that come with the router by default.
Due to the insecurity of the WPS protocol, it is always recommended to disable the WPS protocol in all cases. Whether our router has WPS button or WPS PIN (or both), it is always necessary to disable it for security reasons, this is a very important aspect as most cyber criminals focus on WPS because it is much more easier to break than WPA.
We have seen that one of the techniques can be based on existing security vulnerabilities. It is necessary to have the router in good condition and fully updated. It is recommended that if our router does not have automatic updates, we will visit its official website and check if there is a new firmware version.
Finally, we advise you to change identifiers and factory data. It is very important to change the router management password that is provided by default, this way we will have control over the network and if someone slips into the network, they will not be able to access our router. Of course, in the event of a hack, the first thing you should do is change your Wi-Fi password.