I live behind some student flats on London Road and my internet connection goes really slow although i have a 2mb connection, My router is flashing away and I am guessing these students are using my internet.Does anyone know how i can stop this from happening, at the end of the day I am the one paying for the internet

Yes, set up security on your wireless router. RTFM!

It may not actually be that anyone's accessing you're internet, but if they were why would it be students?

Kev,

Got to go with Lurch on this one!

Wireless networks come with all sorts of security settings - if you don't get them set up then you will get all sorts of people borrowing your connection, not just students.

Set yourself an afternoon or evening aside and change the settings away from the defaults, as well as enabling the encryption available. There are problems with the quality of encryption, as people will tell you on this forum, but some encryption is better than none for your purposes!

Having wireless broadband available and not tying it down is like having a Porsche and leaving the keys in the car, the doors unlocked and a sign saying 'Try Me' on it.

Joe

Agreed, tie the connections down to the MAC address of your network card or cards and setup 128 bit WEP encryption. If your concerned at the moment then logon to your router and browse the connection logs. If you see different MAC addresses connecting then your internet's being abused otherwise it could just be interference.

Originally posted by Lurch
It may not actually be that anyone's accessing you're internet, but if they were why would it be students?

It's either them or the other forum targets - bus drivers!

If this is a stupid question - then feel free to shout me down......

If they are using your network connection, are you able to see what sites are being accessed?? This might help deduce who the culprit may be?

Depends on what model the router is, some you can, and we still don't know if someone actually is accessing his connection.

F9 was on a go-slow yesterday.

I'm still inclined to agree with the advice above though :thumbsup:

And if what FetishFairy said is anything to go by, they may not even be connecting to your connection on purpose.

Are you 100% sure you are using your connection and not another that's available in the area? ;)

It is possible to listen in on wireless networks, especially un-encrypted ones and depending on your router it may also log more information about what they are doing.

If you can login to your router ( see the manual ) then there are probably some options to detect intruders and lock them out.

Another possibility is if you have a virus / zombie on your machine taking up loads of bandwidth. If you are using windows XP then next time you think it's slow, open up the task manager and go to networking. It should show you roughly how much bandwidth you are using.

Also finally, wireless networks work on specific channels. It's possible that someone localy just happens to be using the same channel as you and when they logon to their router it slows you down.

Hope it helps.

Aaron

Is your PC free if spyware and viruses?? Do you have Zone alarm or any other firewall type programs, installed?
Things like that are very liekly to cause your system to slow down. Do you use file sharing programs? Bit torrent clients, kazaa, limewire and all the others all hog bandwidth regardless of the amount of data being up or downloaded, these things might be woth checking.

For the benefit of people who are running a wireless networks without security. Worth thinking about.


And very worryingly, if your connection is used for illegal activity such as accessing illegal images on the Internet, you or your business could be held responsible, even if you have no idea who actually did it. This is because the activity will have been carried out from your address, using your connection.

Taken from http://www.ebcvg.com/articles.php?id=259

Use a program such as Ethereal or Netstat to see what connections are being made, this should help locate if there is IP's connecting that shouldn't be there.

Originally posted by Kry10
Use a program such as Ethereal or Netstat to see what connections are being made, this should help locate if there is IP's connecting that shouldn't be there.

I don't know ethereal but netstat will only show connections to and from his PC, not his router. This would be usefull in finding spyware / virus but only to the trained eye.

The steps already detailed will keep just about everyone out.

you can also make the network invisible (at least with my netgear router you can). So when someone turns on their computer your network doesnt show up. Probably there is some clever way for a hacker to get round this, but presumbaly they will go for easier targets if they just want your badnwidth....

That's SSID broadcast. As in my first post, it's an RTFM job as every manual for wireless routers\access points say enable security, disable SSID etc... If you don't read the manual you get people borrowing your connection.

Just out of interest i did a scan locally and now there are 3 other wireless networks in range. Only one has security turned on. I didn't go any further than that as it's unwise to trust someone elses Wi-Fi connection. You never know if they could be listening on purpose.

how i can stop this from happening



Encrypt the signal. WPA-PSK is prefferable, 128bit WEP if not available.

Change the default SSID. Hide the SSID if your access point/devices allow it.

Change the administrator password on your router.

Use MAC address filtering/MAC allow list.

Set DHCP to hand out fake (none working) addresses. ie: IP's outside of the subnet, incorrect DNS, etc. Or turn off DHCP altogether. Either way you will need to set static IPs on your client machines. If you do either of these it also helps if you run your router on a none standard, but still private, subnet (ie: 192.168.76.* not the default 192.168.0.* or whatever it is for your router). Closing down the subnet mask to only incorporate the amount of machines/IPs you need also helps.

None of the above will stop anybody who's determined but it will stop most people who just want to abuse local unencrypted APs.

Originally posted by Strix
F9 was on a go-slow yesterday.


There was a big collection of Windows security patches on Tuesday, the whole internet was generally slow as a result.

Hey, Are you using a linksys or anyother well know brand by any chance? if so have you changed the default user/pass, this is a comon error and will let anyone with a brain do whatever the hell they like :D

If you live near Hunters Bar and think you're wireless network is being hacked, you may want to check http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43295

Originally posted by march
For the benefit of people who are running a wireless networks without security. Worth thinking about.

Indeed, anyone could just search for routers in the range, and log into yours (if unsecured), and therfore, leech from your internet connection for free!!

:O

:)

Old link, but made me laugh when I first read it. Beware crisp eating hackers....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1860241.stm

One more piece of advice to add to this thread...

If you use WEP encryption, change your WEP key every couple of months.

It's not difficult to hack a WEP protected network, but the hacker needs to capture a lot of data to work out the WEP key. A couple of gigabytes is normal, and there are a few programs out there that will allow you to 'sniff' the information being passed over a wireless network without needing the WEP key. Of course, the information is encrypted so can't be accessed, but after enough has been captured it's possible to obtain the WEP key