On Oct 24, 2005, at 12:57 PM, Rick McCutcheon wrote:
Greetings Mac Folks,
At home I notice that my DSL modem lights occasionally are flashing
quite noticeably when neither my TiBook (Mercury/Panther) nor the
9600 (400/9.1) ethernet connected desk top are on. Both are routed
through a motorola wireless router/ethernet hub.
We live in an apartment block. I'm wondering if others in the
building might be accessing the modem through the wireless router?
I'm assuming that's very possible. I'm curious to know, is there a
way for me to check and see if that is the situation by looking at
wireless activity while I'm hooked up with the TiBook (is this
built into Panther, which I'm still very much learning, or do I
need third party activity tracking software)?
Actually, you should be able to access this via the wireless router
software, I'm unfamiliar with any Moto products, but in others you
can access it and see what devices are attached. Find the airport
id's of your own systems and you can see if any different ones are
attached. For more detailed probing of your local network, you can
use nmap <http://faktory.org/m/software/nmap/> but that's a fairly
geeky tool.
Would other devices like wireless phones possibly make the lights
jump?
not on the DSL router. However, depending on how the local DSL
network is set up you might be getting broadcast traffic to all the
addresses, though that's more common on cable systems. In this case
this is pretty much just network blah blah noise. To check this,
simply unplug the wireless router from the dsl modem. If the
flickering stops it's local traffic, if not it's blah blah.
How worried should I be, if at all.
Somewhat.
Are they getting a free ride?
Odds are 99+% that this is the case; perhaps not even a free ride. If
your DSL service is particularly common in your building, it could
well simply be another customer connecting automatically to your
router instead of theirs. I've seen that happen a number of times.
Still, this could spell trouble should the FBI or RIAA come a'-
knocking...
Or worse?
Unlikely, but possible. Someone coming in through an unlocked access
point or cracked WEP are on the 'inside' on your local network, which
the router keeps private. Once there, all sorts of mischief could be
done. Open file shares could be browsed, 'man-in-the-middle' IP
snooping could be done, the gamut.
Is this level of hacking likely to be going on on your network?
Unlikely.
Could they hack into it without passwords? (Generally I assume
virtually anything is possible...)
If the admin password of the router wasn't changed when you first set
it up, very likely indeed. If you're using WEP authentication, it's
reasonably easy to crack. Unfortunately your systems probably don't
support WPA, a stronger encryption standard.
I've never noticed that anything untoward is happening with my
computers. The TiBook mostly stays at work, in any case.
I almost hate to ask this for fear of what I'll find out -- but
better safe than sorry.
As I said, odds are likely 99% (or even 99.99%) someone in your
apartment building is either going "woo hoo! free internet!" or
thinks they're connecting to their own wireless router.
Steps can be taken to mitigate the problem:
1) Enable WEP encryption with a new password.
2) Make sure the admin password on the router has been changed, to
something secure and hard to guess.
3) Most wireless access points allow you to limit the number of
simultaneous connections and limit connections to specific MAC
addresses. Set yours to 2 (or 1, if you don't use the desktop and the
laptop simultaneously.) and set it to just allow the MAC addresses
(Airport or Ethernet ID of your systems. depending if you're using
the wireless or wired ports) of your systems to connect. Then if you
try to get on, and can't you know someone's mooching, simply
powercycle the wireless router to kick 'em off, and get on.
This will block the casual use and casual snoopers. It's not proof
against a determined bad guy, but as I said, it's unlikely that this
is the case.
--
Bruce Johnson
This is the sig who says 'Ni!'
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