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Wifi Paranoia


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Hello everyone,

Awaiting the delivery of my pineapple, very excited :)

But to the point.

I noticed a new AP in my area, so i booted up BT and fired up airodump to try and locate the AP.

For this is use the highly complex method of walking to the corners of my house while watching the signal power.

Here the catch, the signal is strongest in the center of my living room.. How is that possible..

The only solution i came up with somebody lives in a cave below me and now has wifi, or somebody is hiding in my attic D:

But hopefully there is a more logical explanation..

Using:

Realtek8187 with 2 antennas 5 en 9 dBm in a slight V shape.

Since both my alfa suddenly stopped injecting and authenticating (but they still see AP's etc) but that's another story i guess :)

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Hello everyone,

Awaiting the delivery of my pineapple, very excited :)

But to the point.

I noticed a new AP in my area, so i booted up BT and fired up airodump to try and locate the AP.

For this is use the highly complex method of walking to the corners of my house while watching the signal power.

Here the catch, the signal is strongest in the center of my living room.. How is that possible..

The only solution i came up with somebody lives in a cave below me and now has wifi, or somebody is hiding in my attic D:

But hopefully there is a more logical explanation..

Using:

Realtek8187 with 2 antennas 5 en 9 dBm in a slight V shape.

Since both my alfa suddenly stopped injecting and authenticating (but they still see AP's etc) but that's another story i guess :)

Have you checked you router? Some routers have the ability to use a guest network along with you network. by default it is given a generic name like Guest or Motorola.

Or you can check the dryer maybe the sock monster got wifi. :)

Edited by mreidiv
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  • 3 weeks later...

interesting, I have a narrow beam yagi antenna. I walk around till the signal is strongest or I get the ping I like.

I think the size of the antenna on the Adapter or ap affect this too.

At work the access point is in the attic and the antenna is small. The distance suffers. I bet if I move the ap lower so I can get a better line of sight it will work better. The height is at 15 ft high. As when I am waiting for customers I play with the alfa 802.11n and a 9dbi antenna. I can see all of the local businesses access points. I wish I knew the size of the beam and patterns on the antennas this might help us both. All I understand is the yagi has a narrow beam that goes a longer distance. Omni diretional has a circular pattern this is my two cents.

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Its possible its someones own device setup as an adhoc nearby to you in their home, like a neighbor, or someones router just happens to be bouncing in a direction towards your home from their router or even a wireless printer AP.

Radio waves bounce off metal and even stop when trying to pass through metal and reflect back, so you could be getting reflection and reception off someone else's router in your living room because its the only unrestricted/unobstructed path to the signal of their device. Most wifi only goes about 300 feet unless they have setup a better antenna system or multiple routers in their home to cover their own house with wifi through every room, so if they put up repeaters or bridged multiple routers, you might see bleed from someone nearby, or just coincidentally, your living room is in direct line of site to their AP.

Not sure what its called in linux, but there is a wifi analyzer similar to netstumbler that can show signal strength. You can walk around outside with your laptop and a USB GPS to do site surveys for signal strengths. Kismet I think also has GPS capabilities, and a module to plot a kml for google earth. I used to use netstumbler in windows XP and my GPS to map them in my neighborhood and I could see them on google earth where each (approximate) location of each SSID was. I'm sure linux has some tools for doing the same thing. There are also, stand alone spectrum analyzers, that show signal strength when you are near a wifi hotspot, but not sure what they do to map SSID and MAC addresses, or if they just show general wifi signals nearby.

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