Moocher & My Wireless Network

[Aidoneus]

I've just spent the last hour getting rid of someone who was stealing my wireless network.

A PC Server appeared in my Finder's sidebar. Mounting the machine's C Drive, I saw that the user data was under a name that had nothing to do with any of my friends or family. I changed the password of the network to a stream of gibberish, and changed the encryption key from WPA to WPA2. Within minutes, the PC Server was back in the sidebar.

Eventually, I simply changed the access controls to Timed Access, and added the MAC addressed of all devices which would access the network, which seems to have done the trick.

To cut a long story short, I have two questions;

1) How was the moocher able to access my network so quickly after I changed the password?

2) Obviously having to authorise every MAC address individually isn't the most ideal solution. Is there any way to prevent the answer to 1) happening again, so that I can simply give the password to visiting friends, without mucking around with MAC addresses?

 

[munkery]

I don't think the moocher was able to use your bandwidth. It sounds like he/she had a service setup way too open so that it was accessible over WAN and not secured. Your machine's automatic service discovery was discovering that service and making it available via the finder window.

ISP are supposed to filter out many services so that this doesn't occur for services that are only supposed to broadcast over LAN but sometimes that doesn't happen. When ISP fail to do so, a LAN service is still inaccessible despite being visible in finder.

Also, some apartment buildings use weird network setups to distribute included internet service. This thread talks about that issue.