Security·4,757 discussions

Cyber criminal hacking our WiFi and gaining access to our devices

Tags: Security

A neighbour sits outside our house for hours at a time on laptops/mobiles. My wife had alerts of unknown devices on emails, reports of suspicious activity on professional sites as well as eBay, LinkedIn, Google etc. We had an EE router so were checking admin for unknown devices. The devices section, instead of showing devices, said ‘blocked’. At the same period of time she received a Google alert to an unknown device. Looked into it – it showed a Windows PC alongside my wife’s MacBook Pro (High Sierra OSX). She doesn’t have a Windows PC and was accessing internet by ethernet cable after so much suspicious activity. (There was previously an attempt to open a bank account in her name plus a 15K credit card). We reported everything to Action Fraud and the police. The cyber crime cop claimed that it was ‘impossible’ to hack into WiFi/router/devices and there was no such thing as device cloning or remote access to our devices. We don’t believe him. We think the neighbour has been engaged in nefarious activity on our IP address. I’d like to post some images of the above alerts and would appreciate advice on catching this cyber criminal.

Topic

options

In reply to Cyber criminal hacking our WiFi and gaining access to our devices

It is possible to hack into Wifi/router/devices through different means. Hacking your wifi and hacking your email account are not necessarily linked. Your email, linkedin, bank accounts can be accessed by a hacker through phishing attacks, brute force attacks etc.

To prevent access to your wifi/router by attacker, you can change your wifi password to a more secure password, change your wifi encryption technique to WPA2 if not already, hide your SSID, do MAC filtering in your router etc.

To prevent access to your email/ online bank account/ linkedin, you need to change passwords to more secure passwords, enable 2 factor authentication, not to access these accounts on public wifi, not to open any links received in your email, use a good antivirus software in your computers etc.

[Author]

Replies