Virgin media tech knew my computer name.

Nilrem

Kendall80 wrote: »

Unfortunately its standard practice for some ISPs. In My network places I have an unwanted O2 'computer' which I cannot remove. A little backdoor they setup without telling you so they can 'render assistance when required'. Or take complete control of your computer whenever they like.

That "o2 computer" will actually be the the name the router has for network discovery via upnp from memory.
For example in windows Vista/7/8 my computers will report that they can see both my main router (an Asus) and the router that I use as an access point.

It doesn't mean anyone can take over the machine, as they're visible from the home side of the network, but rather that the interfaces on them are set up so that you (as the user inside the private side of the network) can easily identify and access them without remembering that your modem for example is 192.168.100.1, and your router is 192.168.1.1 or is it 192.168.1.100 or whatever (I have three different makes of router in use here and they all use different IP's, having them accessible via network places etc makes it much easier).


As has been said, if you're using a VM supplied superhub in it's modern router mode, it'll have a log of every device connected to it, and normally in most routers that includes keeping track of the names of the associated devices as well*.
It doesn't mean they can do anything on your network without permission (for example to take over your PC they'd need you to turn on a remote assistance session), it's just a standard router setting, as it's listed in the logs for the router with VM will have access to (they need to for trouble shooting as it records things like the state of the modem and how many times it's reconnected or had an error).


*Which is quite helpful to spot if someone is stealing your wifi, much more so than looking at a list of clients and only seeing "0e:1f:2c..." as the mac addresses.

S0litaire

You don't need to worry until the support person on the other end let's you know where you left you glasses.