Has my home network been hacked?

Rebeller

Hi,

Please move this to "wireless" if need be. It involves a macbbok so thougt it should be posted here.

Hoping someone can confirm my suspicions or ease my anguish over the following situation.

I have a pc connected to eircom broadband via ethernet using netopia 3347NWG broadband router. Wireless is enabled using WPA-PSK with a 62 ASCII character passphrase.

I also have a macbook connecting to the internet via the above router

For thre past few days I have noticed unusual activity on the network (green modem lights flashing when no machines are connected indicating daat being received/sent, extremely slow download speeds even though speedtrest indicates on average 2048/256 (kbps) it's as if somehting else is hogging my bandwidth)

Now my main concern is this. I use the free mac utility "IP scanner" (interested parties can download from here) every now and then to confirm that there are no foreign ip address on my network.

This evening not only has IP scanner picked up my own macbook, pc and router but 2 other unknown devices with the folloiwng ip address: 224.0.0.2 and 224.0.0.251.

I live in an aprtment building and know that there are at least 3 other networks in the vicinity. I am concerned that someone has managed to hack into my wireless network!

I have restarted the router, changed the passphrase and within a few minutes these 2 ip address appear again.

Any ideas? Should I be concerned?

Any info or assistance would be appreciated!

stephend2006

No, your home network has not been hacked.

The addresses you noted are "multicast" addresses as are all in the range 224.0.0.0–224.0.0.255. Very briefly, when you run ip scanner, you send out a packet of info onto your network, the packet will bounce around your network returning info on machines it comes in contact with, however the purpose of the addressing is that your router will not send the packet out into the wide world.

Of course, it is possible to mask your ip address to anything you want, so there is a very slim chance someone has hacked your machine.

I would recomend you use a program like Little Snitch (this will monitor and act as a gate keeper for all comunications on your mac). Also, on your router use WPA encryption and change your key every few weeks.


Hope this helps!!!

Rebeller

Thanks for the info.

I have wpa enabled with a 62 random character password which i change every few weeks. The ssid is set to non broadcast. I also already have little snitch running which hadn't picked up any untoward outbound connections.

I think I'm just a bit paranoid since I have come across a couple of wardrivers in the vicinity of my apartment over the past few months (a couple of the networks in the area are only secured with wep).

Thanks anyway for taking the time to respond. It's put my mind at ease. now get back to the pub and enjoy your pint:D

SouperComputer

For the sake of making life easier for you, enable SSID broadcast.

I can assure you that anyone who is able or willing to crack your WEP let alone WPA key, will have no difficulty finding the network!

In any case, im pretty sure you can sleep at night, its unlikely that you are being "hacked". The simplest way to check if someone is using teh network is simply login to the router and look at the list of connections.

Urban Weigl

Start using WPA2, since WPA has been cracked.