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mystery iphone connecting to protected wifi

TomMelly
Grafter
Posts: 86
Registered: ‎23-08-2007

mystery iphone connecting to protected wifi

Hi,
My router uses WPA-PSK / TKIP wireless security with a pretty good password. However, today I noted that there was something with a host-name of 'iPhone' connected. No one in our household has an iphone or ipad.
I've added its mac (hah) address to an exclusion list and rebooted the router and it's now gone, but I'm mystified as to how it gained access. Any ideas?
2 REPLIES 2
Strat
Community Veteran
Posts: 31,320
Thanks: 1,609
Fixes: 565
Registered: ‎14-04-2007

Re: mystery iphone connecting to protected wifi

WPA security can be cracked but not as easily as WEP.
Could your wireless password have been leaked to anyone outside the household...or guessed?
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TomMelly
Grafter
Posts: 86
Registered: ‎23-08-2007

Re: mystery iphone connecting to protected wifi

Leaked no (I'm fairly sure I'm the only one in the house who knows what it is). Guessed, unlikely. It's a mixture of numbers and letters, over 15 characters long, and not based on any dictionary word. It's not completely random, but a google search on it doesn't produce any hits, so I'm guessing it's not common...
[Moderator's note by Dick (Strat):  Full quote of preceding post removed, as per Forum Rules ]
Edit to add - I've just done some reading-up on cracking WPA, and this looks practically impossible. I remain mystified... is there any chance that my router might assign an IP address to any resource that makes an initial request for access, irrespective of whether they are granted access or not?
It would seem odd to spend a significant resource to crack a bog-standard home-network, and then attach something obvious like 'iPhone' to it. If they'd left the name blank, I probably wouldn't have thought twice (my son's PS3 never broadcasts its name for some reason).... I suppose they might have thought that 'iphone' looked harmless (and we might have had one), and the actual machine attached was something else... all in all, quite odd.