This happened to me a few days ago: the internet was getting slower and slower, web pages were taking a long time to load except on devices that I had connected via Ethernet cable. In search of solutions, the editorial team prepared a guide to improve the speed of your WiFi connection from the iPhone. But that wasn’t enough, it was necessary to find the cause and eradicate it. And that’s it Sometimes someone sneaks into your WiFi network without you realizing it..
And it’s normal to worry. Thanks to wireless networks, we can stream series, check our emails, share files, talk on WhatsApp or Discord, edit photos on Instagram or listen to a Spotify playlist. The Internet is so omnipresent that when it goes down, it disrupts us. And if this failure is due to the fact that there are people saturating your connection, the solution is simple: expel them by this method.
How to find out who has connected to your WiFi network
It is normal that the first thing we want to do is to identify if there are intruders connected to the WiFi network. They may have been taking advantage of our network for days or weeks. But first you must rule out possible problems with the service provider. They all have customer service and phone numbers to provide information about these temporary outages. Also You can consult them online in the services like DownDetector.
Once you have ruled out the possibility of network instability, it is time to take action against this intrusion. A simple way is to disable all products linked to your network, whether wired or wireless. If the router lights continue to flash, there is still incoming network traffic. and outgoing. In other words, there is an unauthorized connection taking advantage of your network.
So it’s time to act. But for this it is advisable to know at least the IP address of your computers. If, for example, you bought a Windows PC and named it “PC-Carlos”, this is its IP address. If you bought an iPhone 14 and named it “New-iPhone”, ditto. This will help you simplify the locking system.
That said, you can create two locking systems:
- Whitelist or whitelist: You choose a range of MAC addresses that will be allowed to access your network. Just those. All others are automatically rejected. This is the most reliable and secure system.
- BlacklistInstead, it chooses the MAC addresses you have detected that are taking advantage of your network and places them in a pool of blocked connections.
How to Block Other People by Leaking Their Devices’ MAC Address
Media Access Control (MAC) addresses are unique identifiers assigned by manufacturers. This data gives us information about the network card of each device connected to the network. Each MAC address is globally unique and, a priori, is fixed for each devicealthough dynamic MAC addresses can be generated to avoid tracking, although this is very unusual.
The safest way to kick out an intruder is to block the MAC address of the device from which he connected. To do this, follow these steps:
- First, you need to enter the router configuration. You can use any browser and write 192.168.1.1 (or 192.168.0.1) in the search bar.
- Immediately after, it will ask you for your access credentials. They must be provided to you by the telecommunications company with which you have subscribed to the Internet service. If you have not changed them, Generics are usually “1234” or “Admin”you can try them.
- Once inside, you will see a menu similar to this one, perhaps more vertical or horizontal:
As we have done, what you need to do is enter general settingsthen go to the “Security” or “Security” options and finally go down to a section that concerns MAC address filtering. This is where you can create your whitelist or blacklist, following the criteria you prefer.
Once this is done, you need to save the changes (in ‘Apply’ in my case) and that’s it. Of course, we also recommend turning off the router every night or scheduling a few hours of rest/disconnection. This reset reorganizes the incoming connections by frequency and optimizes the speed. And of course, if you still suspect an intrusion, reset your router to factory settings to avoid possible unwanted changes. It is usually done in a very simple way: by holding down a small back button, the reset button for 10-15 seconds.
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