When you sign up for fibre optic at Axarfusion, our technicians will visit your home and install a Wi-Fi router. This will be the device that broadcasts the internet to our phones, tablets and computers.
In order to protect our connection, this device is equipped with what we call “Wi-Fi key protection”. We will have to use it on each device so that it can start navigating.
However, this means that anyone who has, or guesses, the Wi-Fi password will be able to connect to our Internet and surf at our expense. How can we find out? We will explain it to you.
Problems if our wifi has been stolen
Normally in communities there are certain individuals who, even though they have their own wifi, seek and try to take over the networks of other neighbours. Why would they want to steal our wifi?
Sometimes these people find that when their wifi stops working, they connect to your wifi so that they can continue surfing. On these occasions there should be no further problem (although our speed may be reduced by the number of connected devices).
Problems could start if our neighbour starts to misuse the internet, visiting politically incorrect or scam websites. By doing so, our IP (our home web address) will be logged and we will be held accountable.
How do you know if someone is using it?
We can find out if someone is connected to our network in several ways. The most common one is to notice that our internet is running much slower than usual. This may mean that more devices are connected to the network.
There are some anti-viruses that have systems for detecting new locally connected devices.
Finally, we would like to share with you a programme that can easily detect all these “Wifi thieves”. The programme is called Fing. With this programme for Windows and macOS and both Android and iOS mobiles. This software, once installed, will analyse all the IPs of our router and detect all the connected devices. Once we have identified which ones are not yours, we will know who will be connected.
You can download the programme here:
Improve the security of your Wifi
Our recommendation if we have detected intruders on our wifi is to improve the security of our device. To do this, we need to change the Wi-Fi password.
The router devices have a default password, which can easily be changed in the router’s configurator. One of the options that can help improve security is to choose a WPA-2 type key with AES encryption.
Ideally, our new password should be long and should be able to contain uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers and symbols. This will make it more difficult to guess.
