Having an intruder in your home network not only reduces your Internet connection speed, but in the worst case it can represent a risk to the security of your information and online communications.The intruder will have the possibility to intercept your banking transactions or activities in social networks and steal credit card numbers, seize user credentials, among other types of cybercrime.
The reasons why a person who is not part of the family has access to our Wi-Fi network are diverse. They cover aspects such as routers without keys or very weak keys, neighbors who have shared the key or more dangerous situations such as attacks on the security of the router by people with advanced knowledge of networks.
That is why the best way to detect unauthorized users on your Wi-Fi network is to obtain a list of all the connected devices and discard one by one their belonging to the family group.
This analysis operation is very simple and can be done from a mobile device, you just have to keep in mind that in the evaluation you do you should not ignore light bulbs or smart plugs or Chromecast or Mi Box S type dongles because no matter how insignificant they are They all seem to use the wireless network and have an IP address that identifies them within it.
How to detect an intruder on Wi-Fi?
On iPhone or Android, download Fing – Network Scanner from the App Store or Google Play Store. Then open the app.
Fing scans the network the phone is currently connected to and lists all connected devices, starting with the router. Fing displays their IP addresses, MAC addresses and, if possible, identifies them by name. Once you have this information at hand, do the corresponding analysis.
It is recommended that you use all the technical information you have about your wireless devices, in particular, the MAC addresses since they are unique identifiers for each device, not their IP addresses, which can vary with each router restart.
What to do if you detect a suspicious device connected to your Wi-Fi?
If after all the analysis and comparison of information you come to the conclusion that there are one or more strange devices, you should take the radical action of changing the password of the router, since this is the best way to eliminate it from your Wi-Fi network.
This procedure is carried out from any Wi-Fi device that has an Internet browser. In this case your own mobile device.
Simply connect the device to the Wi-Fi network. Then, enter the IP address of the router from the web browser and when you are asked for the username and password to access the configuration of this device, fill in said information, which is available on the label located on its back.
Usually the default IP address of today’s routers is 192.168.1.1. but they may also have been assigned 192.168.0.1. or 192.168.100.1.
Once this is done, enter its configuration section, locate the security section and generate a new network name along with a new password using the maximum possible security in order to avoid future intrusions. Be sure to do it with the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands of your router.
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