wifi being "hacked" problem

[peterabbits]

my son is telling me one of his friend's keeps hacking our wifi and slowing his connection speed down while gaming, forcing him to constantly reset our wifi router - i barely know enough about wifi and computers in general to get myself into a lot of trouble lol. when i asked how he could be hacking our wifi, he says his friend is getting his IP address and then hacking it that way.

we live out in the country, on 2+ acres of land, and there's no way it's being done from a "skimmer" or something like that physically close enough to access.

i'm assuming it's possible to hack the wifi remotely, but if this is happening as our son is saying, exactly what access could he be getting? and how do i prevent this from occurring? i always thought that as long as you kept your SSID name private and your password strong, you were pretty safe.

i have a private SSID (you have to know the name and manually type it in), and my password was a 57 character randomly generated password, so i always thought i was pretty secure.

thank you in advance for the help!

[HUTCH 7.62]

So why is’nt your son hacking his buddies wifi?

[Fizz]

Your son's speculation is baseless IMO.

If your password is strong, and son didn't leak it, it's secure.

It is possible to do a deauthentication attack without password, or jam, but really unlikely.

You may have internet, wifi, or other issues, but jumping to hacking is almost always jumping the gun.

[DoubleA]

Inside job? Could your son have accidentally leaked the SSID and password?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[vino68]

Make sure your router is up to date with its firmware and use WPA2 with AES.
And if you are compromised, it may not have anything to do with Wi-Fi. Check to make sure the router's username and password are complex and not open for remote login.
If rebooting the router clears it, may be a channel issue. Check which channels you are using for Wi-Fi and if any other devices in the home or area are on the same channels. The frequency used for Wi-Fi is free to use, so other devices use it as well.
I would also lock down Wi-fi access via MAC addresses or use certs. But I do not know if consumer devices allow it.

[bigbearbear]

His friend isn't "hacking" your wifi. What that "friend" of your son is doing, is that he is able to obtain what the IP address of your router (most likely because your son is playing on a server hosted by this idiot) and this fella is launching a Denial of Service attack on your IP address. Basically flooding and bombarding your router with tons of zombie attacks, causing it to slow down.

If you son know who this person is, make a police report. And tell your son to stop playing games on other people's hosted server or visiting questionable web sites.

[vino68]

His friend isn't "hacking" your wifi. What that "friend" of your son is doing, is that he is able to obtain what the IP address of your router (most likely because your son is playing on a server hosted by this idiot) and this fella is launching a Denial of Service attack on your IP address. Basically flooding and bombarding your router with tons of zombie attacks, causing it to slow down.

If you son know who this person is, make a police report. And tell your son to stop playing games on other people's hosted server or visiting questionable web sites.

That as well. Wow, DDOS...1999 called and wants its attack back.

[hermosabeach]

Watch 2-4 videos on your router on YouTube

Connect to your router
Set up a new admin password to the router

Install updates

Set up a new Wi-Fi name & password
Set up guest Wi-Fi name and password - guests cannot connect to other devices on network and more

Take son’s device from him
Go into another room. Enter the Wi-Fi & password for guest account into sons device. Return it to him.


Now he can use Wi-Fi and cannot give out the password.


Decide if you want to use parental controls on guest Wi-Fi network
What sites to block
Generate a report of all sites visited
Set a Time or use on the guest network. Sunday night - Thursday night - shut off Wi-Fi access at 10? 9? 11?

Post a list of sites visited on fridge from guest network

You will also learn to see what devices are on or have attached to your network.

[peterabbits]

Thanks everyone!

[Fizz]

His friend isn't "hacking" your wifi. What that "friend" of your son is doing, is that he is able to obtain what the IP address of your router (most likely because your son is playing on a server hosted by this idiot) and this fella is launching a Denial of Service attack on your IP address. Basically flooding and bombarding your router with tons of zombie attacks, causing it to slow down.

If you son know who this person is, make a police report. And tell your son to stop playing games on other people's hosted server or visiting questionable web sites.

Unless there is a service open to the world (NAT/Port Forwarding), web based admin, etc. the router will block incoming unsolicited connections.

It's pretty difficult to (D)Dos as connection without an underlying service to attack.

[Robotron2k84]

Untrue. A "loaded" TCP SYN packet is 40 bytes without any ACK or handshake, and with window and MSS sizing.

If you can generate on the order of 1000-10000 packets per second you can overwhelm most home routers. It's not completely resource-free to drop a packet, it still takes a quantum of CPU and memory to dispatch it to the proper queue.

[IsaacMc]

Look up MAC address filter and go that route

[Fizz]

Untrue. A "loaded" TCP SYN packet is 40 bytes without any ACK or handshake, and with window and MSS sizing.

If you can generate on the order of 1000-10000 packets per second you can overwhelm most home routers. It's not completely resource-free to drop a packet, it still takes a quantum of CPU and memory to dispatch it to the proper queue.

I won't rule out poor software/hardware, but even most junk won't succumb to this, and even ISPs are hip to this form of attack. Though, I haven't played with this in a while. I'll have to see what I can pull off in a lab.

[Robotron2k84]

A SYN flood works in three ways: if there is a listening service, ACKs/RSTs can consume upstream bandwidth. Secondly, if the device is NAT'ing, and packets are inspected at the FORWARD stage, the severity of the flood can outstrip the NAT table. Thirdly, even with both prior cases unavailable, the SYN flood can consume the incoming connection buffer or even cause spurious system interrupts on a non-ASIC PHY (software TCP, non offload) to peg the system CPU.

Even worse is a UDP flood on a home router that will send ICMP unreachable on return. That's a guarantee to flood the outbound pipe.

[SkyHawk]

I agree it is a denial of service attack, no one is hacking the router. All you can do is ask the ISP to block the DDOS traffic before it reaches you. And they probably won't help you but it doesn't hurt to ask. If they are willing, they can identify the type of traffic, the source, and then drop packets from that source upstream so it never hits your pipe.