Campquake Senate

This is just weird. In my home I have a wireless network, and it works very well. All of a sudden today, it reset on it's own, renamed itself, and got rid of the encryption password we had put on it... is this normal????

I'd say either your wireless access point reset to factory defaults, or someone gained access and decided to change all your settings.

It renamed itself to P1Access-7a8a7a

Normally it's named Default

sounds like you had someone using your wireless to me, unless it just crashed and got all buggy on ya.

I'd reset it to your settings, enable encryption, and then enable MAC address filtering.

Unfortunately, wireless security is pretty poor. Even with encryption and MAC filtering a determined person can get in fairly easily, if there is a lot of traffic to examine.

this is true, but the more secure you have it, the harder it is for any joeblow to get into it.

I've already got it back to normal, with encryption's and whatnot. Strange that it happened while we were all using it...

D.A.R.K.[CotC] wrote:I've already got it back to normal, with encryption's and whatnot. Strange that it happened while we were all using it...

That's not strange. Only 2 things are necessary for an attack; 1) it's out of the box, and 2) it's plugged in.

A lot of these consumer wireless devices have their manuals on-line. And have a weak enough processors that an attack can get them to restart. Once restarted, they often fall back to a default security setting that is also in the manual. It would only take seconds for an attacker to set a new password and to begin to play on your network. If your transmit power is 100% when you don't need it, then you're giving the attacker even more radius to attack you from. Like Warf said, wireless security is poor. Especially true for the consumer grade devices.