Is my router being used by my neighbour

Giraffe76

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Hi all,

I live in a large block of flats and ive noticed that unfortunately my neighbour (who ive fallen out with) is charging his phone using the plug in the corridor which is on the other side of the wall to our lounge where our router is but there has been times when he just stands out there using his phone and i was wondering if there is anyway he might be able to use our internet connection as he uses a friends wireless conncection further down the corridor the other way.

The router is a sky router and has always been password protected ever since we have started to use it about 18 months ago but as hes using the plug in the corridor to charge his phone (which he shouldnt do) he wouldnt care less in using our internet conenction so i wanted to make sure he couldnt use it.

hope this post makes sense

Kind regards Mark
 
If you still have it on the original admin password then definitely change it.
 
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It's also good practice to change the admin password to something other than defaults.
 
You should always change the default password on a home router. Second why is he charging his phone outside his flat ? surely he would be doing that in his own flat.
Third, do you know where this wall socket is wired to for power ?
 
You could also lock it down to MAC address if you wanted too, bit of a pain to set up all your devices on the router, but a certain way to ensure he's not using it. But as other said make sure you change your password on the router so he cant access it and change anything.
 
I view MAC locking (like SSID hiding) as generally not worth the hassle as it's trivially simple to evade by someone who is acting with nafarious intent. It's really only a barrier to people "accidentally" connecting to your WLAN and a good passphrase achieves the same effect to prevent accidental connection without all the hassle of maintaining the MAC tables.

MAC locking is a bit of a hang over from the days when there wasn't any "security" of Wi-Fi links at all and MAC locks were the only "security" available. Even back in the day, it was trivially easy to get around.
 
You should always change the default password on a home router. Second why is he charging his phone outside his flat ? surely he would be doing that in his own flat.
Third, do you know where this wall socket is wired to for power ?

why bother? It's not like they are generic passwords and they are probably more secure than ones people change them to as people generally pick actual words and memorable phrases for passwords where as the default wifi password is generally random characters and numbers.
 
He is not using your internet but he is is using the electricity which you will be paying for in your service charge, if you report him they might fit sockets which need keys to work
 
Because they are the same for a given model, even a number of models from the same manufacturer.
Sky have one default password on their ADSL routers for example.
 
Because they are the same for a given model, even a number of models from the same manufacturer.
Sky have one default password on their ADSL routers for example.

I was on about wifi passwords which certainly are not the same for each router. Even if the sky stupidly set the admin password the same for each router if he hasn't given out his wifi password to his neighbour it makes no difference.
 
Alot of providers give you the info on the base of the router. Or as in BT it is on the base and on a card in a slot on the back. It wouldn't take long for a less that scrupulous neighbour to snap a pic with a camera phone or scribble down the details and you would be none the wiser.
 
Slightly off topic, but I see a lot of people charging phones laptops etc in public with no concern for the bill payer.
 
I don't have sky router but if you know he is out there log on and look at connected devices, may answer the question before you look for answers.
 
can afford iphone (or smart phone) or any phone for that matter, can afford credit to use it, cant pay to charge it, some people confuse me,
 
If it is a sky router you can look in the admin pages and see what devices are connected (and also have been connected n the past) to your router
 
Slightly off topic, but I see a lot of people charging phones laptops etc in public with no concern for the bill payer.

The largest 100Wh laptop batteries cost about 1.3p to fully charge at average (home) electricity prices. The smaller phone batteries are 20-30 times lower capacity than that (~5Wh).
 

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