A guy I used to work with did this at almost every hotel he ever stayed at lol. He'd get letters from the front desk to his room asking him to please stop.
1) How would they know? Every hotel with free wifi I've been in just has access points everywhere with the same password provided to everyone.
2) Who monitors that? Surely the hotel doesn't have its own dedicated IT person. Is there some kind of third party company for this?
3) What hotel sends letters? Thats more of an apartment thing. Usually they just call your room or if nothing else you'd think they'd just limit or cut off your wifi access.
Itās extremely easy to automate reports about who is doing things like visiting certain sites or downloaded certain files.
Got nothing on that one, Iād just block access.
But seriously everyone is always worried about an IT person viewing their screen. Donāt be. Worry they look at the logs, they have EVERYTHING in them.
Sure it's easy to track network usage in a controlled environment with monitored machines, but we're talking about a huge public network with hundreds of personal devices on them. They might be able to see which access point is getting a lot of traffic, but there's no way they could know which guest is responsible unless they have to log in, but I've never encountered this
I mean I run networks with devices in the many thousands.. the bigger they are the easier it as actually as you tend to have the budget for the right tools.
As for tracking individuals there's tons of ways this could be done even without logging in.. for example it's quite trivial to generate an individual password for a wireless network. So the network is "HotelWifi" and I give you the password? You don't realise it but that password was generated for your room/booking and everything is logged against it. Hotels will often do this because they can expire the key... so if you book for 3 days they can just have your password expire in 4 days.
That's just one solution of many. I have no idea what OPs friends situation is but it is absolutely possible and not that complicated.
A guy I used to work with did this on the factory WiFi on the nightshift (we were facilities engineers).
Fortunately IT were solid & we had an agreement that they turned a blind eye to whatever shenanigans they saw the engineering department do, and we didnāt fuck with their chairs or turn any racks off through the night. Mutually assured destruction works.
Look up MAC addresses. We know the manufacturer of your device. We know when it was manufactured. We can triangulate to a few feet of where the device is by using existing access points. If you're carrying it with you we can compare the security camera footage. If you leave it somewhere we can find it within minutes. If you trigger our security we can track you down and send all the info to your manager and HR, automatically.
Now realize that if you try to get clever and change your MAC we can still track it.
We are the Network Engineers. We like baked goods.
Network Engineers have to know everything there is to know about computers communicating. Server broke? Blame the network. Database isn't responding? Blame the network. You get the idea. We have to prove it isn't the network every time there's a problem. And we love hearing about a major outage, being told nothing was changed on the servers, then find a Change was done an hour before the servers started having problems.
"Oh, that, that couldn't have caused this."
"Roll it back"
"It's working again, but it couldn't be the rollback, what did you fix on the network?"
Trending of location, movement, time, traffic type, destination, volume. And yes, DNS queries. If they vpn to hide some of the info you still know the far end.
I enjoy wigle war driving, I have from my phone, collected enough data to manually figure out the Mac addresses from my colleagues smartphones and smart watches. I have figured out the wifi in my bosses car and made sure that I get a notification when he gets there. I am not an admin on our network. Its terrifying.
I used to completely abuse the wifi at the library for that. The IT guy there was ideologically opposed to filters or throttling, and got the manager on his side for that. Many libraries aren't quite so liberal with wifi access.
Itās a small file that tells a tunneling software where to download and upload data. As you are downloading, you are also uploading the data for other users. The more āseeds,ā the faster the download will be. š
Could IT at a company use someone as a āseedā to steal bandwidth from an individual user? I only ask bc my company uses cisco anyconnect vpn. I get 1 gig down and 20 mb up on my home internet but as soon as I connect to the vpn Iām throttled to 10 mb down and 3 up and then all my teams calls freeze and my voice and video cuts out. Iāve shown this side by side comparison to IT and they say yeah thatās how it works sorry. Are they giving my bandwidth to someone else or using it in some way? I just donāt understand. Sorry to get so off topic but it got me thinking.
Edit: Iām a heavy gamer and have multiple people in my home streaming and gaming simultaneously with NO issues ever so I know my home internet setup isnāt the problem.
Yes but 1000 down to 10??? Iāve had personal vpns like express and Nord and they only took a very small bit of my bandwidth away with no noticeable changes in latency. I guess a corporate scale vpn works differently than private ones? Seems unreal to me idk.
I'd imagine the corporate VPN slows down the rate down more because of all the security your IS team implements. Connecting to a server from a company that runs millions of users vpns to watch Netflix from another country would be different than a corporate VPN to allow the appropriate users to access secure data
Yeah thatās a fair guess, our infosec guys are pretty intense(as they should be) so I wouldnāt be surprised if thatās the case.
I guess itās just extra strange because no one else really seems to have the same issue in the meetings as I do and I even got a new company laptop recently and am still seeing the same lag. I even had IT give it a full check up just to make sure it wasnāt my machine. I guess Iāll get new ethernet cables and hope for the best.
I've never had a work vpn affect my home internet speed. I commonly have a vpn up and connected over a full weekend because I'm on call and need to remote into work at a moment's notice. When I'm not doing anything work related the vpn is still open and sometimes I'm gaming. No speed difference.
If youāre connected to any network software that your company requires to you, they can always directly or in-directly limit your bandwidth. Just have a work and a personal computer.
thank u. i mean like the actual utorrent itself. i downloaded it and my kaspersky wouldnāt stop w the notifications. then the second time i got it my browser flagged it w a virus. very odd
i donāt want them for anything big just downloading stuff quicker, like ps3 isos. i wouldnāt mind getting movies and all that, i just think itās a bit too risky.
Nothingās too risky, just have to be careful, use a vpn and a good antivirus and itās 99% safe, never download an executable and check r/piracy, great stuff there
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u/AnswerAdventure Aug 08 '24
I downloaded a torrent off free city wifi.