security issue

oldscratch

Hello everyone. Bear with me if you will, i'm not all that tech savvy. I'm using eircom broadband with a netopia wireless modem. My pc is connected to the modem by cable from my ethernet card and my housemate has a seperate pc connected with a wireless card.
I noticed lately that even when his pc is completely shutdown the wireless link status light on the modem has been flashing. Just on and off every couple of seconds. I'm using the standard WEP security and have ZoneAlarm and other antivirus and spyware progs running. I live in an apartment complex and am just wondering if someone is piggybacking on my broadband or is there any other reason this light would be flashing and if it is someone tapping in how I can stop them.
Thanks for your time and thanks in advance for any help.

OldScratch

layke

Don't worry, your PC is contantly talking to your modem/router it will flicker regardless. Same applies to your modem and ISP.

All normal, the only way to know is if you get slow speeds on your line.

You can as an extra measure open a dos prompt box and type ipconfig /all which will give you your mac address. You can then use (if you have a router and it supports that option) Mac filtering to allow only yours through.

The majority of people don't know how to crack WEP.

Clover

i use the eircom netopia wireless router and the first thing i did was to go into expert mode/configure/dhcp and changed the routers default ip # and also the amout of ip#s it could give out to two ( one for the pc and one for the xbox 360 ).

then i changed it's default ssid and thicked the " enable closed system mode " which turns ssid broadcast off and also changed the routers password and set up wep.

i'v used wireless routers for a few years now and have never had a problem so far but i keep an eye on my speeds and cap .

nava

HI

I do not have Eircom broadband router so not sure if it will be there but if you do you should also enable the Filter Mac address so you could limit it to the Mac addresses you use.

Regards

Foxwood

According to the Netopia manual, you should be able to telnet into the netopia and issues the command "show wireless clients" to list the MAC address of any connected wireless clients. (The information should be somewhere in the web interface too, but I can't find it mentioned in the manual). This will tell you if anyone is connected to your router that you don't expect.

I'm afraid the advice about enabling WEP is pretty useless - WEP can be cracked in a matter of minutes. If you're going to the trouble of setting up encryption (and you'd be silly not to), you should be using WPA-PSK, which is not only more secure, it's also easier to use and set up. Cloning a MAC address is pretty trivial too, so MAC filters don't offer much real protection either, they're only an inconvenience to anyone who is deliberately trying to leech off your service.

event

reset the modem and change the WEP key

watty

Yep mac filter even faster to beat than WEP.

oldscratch

thanks for the help guys. Much appreciated.