My old router let a stranger into my home network last month

I was sitting in my living room in Cleveland last month and noticed my internet was acting strange. Devices kept disconnecting and reconnecting every few minutes. At first I thought it was my ISP having issues, so I called them and they said everything looked fine on their end. Then I checked my router admin page and saw a device listed I did not recognize connected to my wifi. Turns out I had been using the default admin password for years on my old Netgear router and never thought to change it. A neighbor or someone nearby must have guessed it with some simple tool. I changed the password to something long and random, turned on WPA3 encryption, and disabled WPS immediately. Has anyone else dealt with neighbors mooching wifi this way without noticing for a while?

2 comments

2 Comments

emerycarr3d ago

Oh man, that's exactly what happened to me with my old Linksys a couple years back (I live in an apartment building so it was probably someone two floors up). The WPS thing is a huge weak point too, I disabled that and turned off guest network broadcasting and it seemed to stop the random devices from popping up.

grant.jason3d ago

Did you check if your neighbor had their wifi name set to something like "Free Public Wifi"? My buddy Dave in Akron had the same thing happen and it turned out the guy upstairs was literally named his network "Not Dave's Wifi" and Dave didn't realize for three months because he figured it was some new xfinity hotspot or something. He only caught on when his Netflix started showing recommendations for anime he never watched.