I think someone is using my broadband allowance

scottishblondie

the log unfortunately doesn't record individual connections to the wireless, but with that router you can log in an click on "attached devices" to see which devices are currently connected. you might need to refresh the page a couple of times, for some reason mine doesn't always show all my stuff the first time. if there are more devices connected than you have, then someone is taking advantage.

once you've secured the network this won't be a problem anyway, and it wouldn't really help figure out who it was without a lot more detective work, so this is probably useless information unless you desperately want to know!

JasX

scottishblondie wrote: »

and it wouldn't really help figure out who it was without a lot more detective work,

...well you never know they might have been a lapse with their computer name etc and you could catch them that way..... also popping wireshark on might give a few clues

maxtweenie

forumfan wrote: »

As I mentioned in post 7, I only really use the internet for browsing (I do a lot of shopping online) or as a remote connection to work. Obviously I am on MSE daily

I never download music or programmes and maybe once or twice a month my young son will play a game on Mini Clips or Cbeebies.

I have literally gone from using an average of 2.5GB per month to 5.82GB last month

Are you sure you're not dragging big files over the VPN?

forumfan_2

maxtweenie wrote: »

Are you sure you're not dragging big files over the VPN?

I don't think so, most of the work I do from home is to import data from csv files into the system so the files are small. Also, the high usage dates don't match up with days I have worked from home.

In fact some of the high usage dates correspond with dates when we were away from the house for most of the weekend i.e. I was away with the kids and my husband was working and before you say 'how do you know it wasn't your husband'..... 1) he works very long hours and 2) he has enough trouble finding his way around when I put icons on the desktop for him :rotfl:

d-seven

It's best to change the router password as well as the WPK one. The netgear router I had was set to admin and no password so i changed bothe the admin name and password to something strong.
Someone in the vacinity to me had a similar router and hadnt changed the default and someone who isnt me was able to log in to it and could of changed the details if they had been so inclined. But being a good person, didn't!
From a dos prompt, type IPCONFIG and press return..
You will get a display, and where it says Default Gateway, the IP that follows this is the IP address of your admin screen.

Also, change the router name too.. this can be done via the admin screen.. it wont stop people trying to connect, but if someone has been connectted to your router as that name, then when they try again, it will say it cant find it.

Also, you can set it so only certain MAC addresses can connect too the router, thus stopping any other hardware from connecting.

It really is worth trying to learn about these type of things as it can make your internet experience safer.

The other thing is, if someone is using your router to download illigal content, it will show as being downloaded to your IP address and that will be traced to your ISP who will in turn, be able to find who was using that IP address at that time.
I walked past a car parked outside a house about half a mile up the road from me and noticed the driver had a laptop viewing waht looked like a nude woman on the screen. My guess is he was leeching off someone's unsecured broadband to download pr0n!

JasX

what you also might want to try is installing one of the free netmeter type applications that measures/totalises exactly how much data you are uploading/downloading and check that yourself.

Limitations:
-only measures traffic from the computer its installed on so if you have several you'd need to install it on all of them and add up the totals yourself.
-also it can't differentiate between internet and local traffic so if say you swapped a file between 2 machines locally (ie not going onto the internet and not using your bandwidth quota) the program would still count that as traffic and you'd need to make some allowance for it....

Torkijo

forumfan wrote: »

I have a wireless router (Netgear DG834G V4) and I think someone is using my broadband allowance as my usage more than doubled last month.

Is there any way that I can find out for definite?
If I change the default passwords is this enough to prevent it happening in the future?

Many thanks for reading

Hi

I had that a few months ago - just as the Summer Holidays started so think it was a returning student.

After doing the security things BT also recommended the bandwidth monitor at Think Broadband saying it was the commercial one most similar to the one they use, have to say having downloaded it (Its free) i find it very useful to know how much capacity i have left in my allowance each month so can use the last few days each month to back up photo's & video online.

Can be found here:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tbbmeter.html

espresso

forumfan wrote: »

I don't think so, most of the work I do from home is to import data from csv files into the system so the files are small. Also, the high usage dates don't match up with days I have worked from home.

In fact some of the high usage dates correspond with dates when we were away from the house for most of the weekend i.e. I was away with the kids and my husband was working and before you say 'how do you know it wasn't your husband'..... 1) he works very long hours and 2) he has enough trouble finding his way around when I put icons on the desktop for him :rotfl:

So have you checked if your wireless was encrypted? It's very easy to set-up.

If you can't set-up wireless encryption yourself, simply disable the wireless and use an Ethernet cable until you can get help to configure adequate encryption to protect your bandwidth.